What did I do last week? You wouldn't believe me if I told you!

If you didn't notice, I went a little lax last week with the postings on WordPress.

The kids were back in school, the weather had become a little cooler (less than 100+), and I attacked a series of projects around the house that have been begging for attention.

Honestly, I have to ask how many of you have photo albums sitting around.  Yes, photo albums!  This probably doesn't apply to the younger generation, who would look at me and ask what 110 or 35mm film was with a blank look on their face (the same I get when I show my kids the rotary phone and the old LPs I still have!)   Back in the day, we cared cameras that didn't have the fancy chip that can slip into a computer, downloading every image into prearranged folders.

We had cameras that required film no longer sold at stores and, among the many, we took pictures as if they were going out of style.  The generations of the past wanted to capture as many images as possible of our world, and save it for our children and loved ones. 

I have decades of pictures stored in old albums.  Many are from my infancy, crisp black and whites of a curious child that stared at the camera with impatience.  Others are of a country that has changed, grown, and merged into a more advanced world, all thanks to the demolition of the Berlin Wall.  Yes, I'm the product of an era where Afros, bell-bottom jeans, The Berlin Wall, 8-track stereos, and LPs were all the fad.  I remember when Adidas was just a cheap tennis shoe and everyone wore PF flyers, when computers were the size of refrigerators, and we only had 4 channels to watch on TV.  We took pictures, hundreds and thousands of them, had them developed at the local store, and pasted them into albums.  These were our memories–and the photo era goes back far into our past.  Some are hand me downs of family, close to 100 years old.  These more fragile ones I treasure most, especially when I stare into faces of my ancestors, and thank whoever decided they needed the image for posterity.  As an avid genealogist, I'm avidly searching for family portraits of my past, many that were lost on the person's passing.

So, I decided to start scanning each image into my computer…a task that requires patience and A LOT OF TIME!

I attacked the photo albums, scanning pictures onto the computer for hour after hour.  Even in the safety of their protective covers, many are damaged, their scratches appearing only under the fine scanner lens.  Others are fading into horrid shades of yellow and orange, the subjects vanishing into time.   Some make me smile—images of my children taking their first steps, the day they came home from the hospital, their first day of school.  Others are of my grandchildren, fresh smiling faces that remind me so much of the past.  Still others bring poignant memories of the past—the face of my Grammy, who we lost in 1970, my Pappy who passed the day before my 16th birthday, and my great grandparents, who passed away while we lived in Germany.  I have pictures of my parents, young and fresh faced, sunburnt, and the image of my dad before he shipped off to Vietnam.    I have these memories only because I kept the pictures.  My brothers and children are too young to recall these people from our past, but I can share my memories with them over and over again through photos and the computer.

God Bless Technology!

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