Scanning Family Memories

We had the rare snowfall today here in Portland, Oregon. This morning about an inch of snow fell, and since the temperature has been below freezing for the past days driving is not an option to me. The roads are too icy and I live on a mountain that requires a great deal of steep turns. I am a no-snow southern "gentleman" who has vowed to never drive an automobile in snowy or icy conditions. Thus, I spent today inside reading, watching TV a bit and putting out Mardi Gras decorations in my house. Afterward, I decided to enter my attic and find some of those old family pictures that I have been meaning to scan and upload into my computer.

My time on this earth is dwindling, My daughter is the last surviving member besides me, but is interested in our family history. Scanning them now  into my computer seems like a good idea for a snowy day. I have two  large containers of old pictures that were obtained from various deceased members of the family. It's all that remains. Like most other families, our family seemed to not have kept many of the photos taken and to have labeled few of them. Because there is few identification on the photos and many of those pictured are strangers to me, some non family members others who died before I was born, it makes selecting photos for the scan an easier project. I do not scan what I do not know.

I suspect that one day that my daughter will discard the unknown pictures, or at least, do what other generations of the family have done, hide them in a box and hope they go away, a kind of burial tomb for people long gone and forever unknown. I wonder what those pictured would say if they knew how their earthly images were treated.  Looking at the pictures and many of the non picture items in those containers is quite an emotional impact for me. Is there a better way to learn about the past than from old pictures and documents? I suspect, no. Too, one gains an even greater respect and love for his or her family when sorting through those personal treasures.

My favorite find, or re fined, since I have seen it before, is the old childhood stamp collection of my father. This dates to when he was a boy of 10, 11 or 12 in the mid 1920's. With the stamps are letters from him to and from buyers of stamps. At such an early age my father was literate enough to run a home stamp trading business, masking his identity as a child and creating a new one as that of a 30 year old business man. His writing is extraordinarily mature for a child, probably no one today could detect that his business correspondence with those clients was written by a 12 year old. I doubt the old stamps I have from him are worth much today, but those letters and the images they provide make me wish for more snowy days.