Pictures

About this time last year I posted about the importance of putting names and dates on pictures that your family has. I mentioned about Kirk a cousin of mine, sent me a bunch of pictures of my side of of our shared family.  I received an email from him on Sunday with another picture. When he found it, it was not in very good condition, through the magic of computer enhancement, he brought it back to life.

To tell a little of my family story Kirk's grandmother and my mother were best of friends.  When my grandfather and grandmother divorced it was quite a trauma on my mother, she was an only child, and my grandmother no longer associated with that side of the family. I have a diary from about that time and you can see the change in her writings and she quit school. In the picture my mother was about four or five years old, from left to right, her grandmother; her great grandmother; My mother; her great grandfather a Union Civil War veteran;  and her father   

The first batch if pictures that Kirk sent contained pictures of my grandfather, that was the first time I had ever seen a picture of him, or any one else in the maternal side of my family.

It is important that someone in your family keeps records of the family and they are passed on.  If you send a digital school picture make sure you name it using the full name and year. Don't use uncle Bob or grandma use a full name. 

In the OHS Archives there are many albums listed that way.  They know the primary family name but without doing a genealogical search, still only an educated guess there is no positive proof as to who they are. Luckily they have a lot of pictures that are marked. 

When you are in your seventies, your health is going downhill, your parents and relatives have passed away, it is not the time to ask the questions you should have asked when you were younger.

I found this picture on Twitter, I'm at @OlmstedHistory, it pretty well sums up what most people think of Genealogy.