Life’s Curveballs

Technology has come a long way in a short amount of time. It’s really evident when you look at photography and photographic equipment. A trip to Wal-Mart or any major retailer that sells cameras and electronic equipment will tell you just how far we have come, that is if you are over 20 years old. Everything is digital now and I have vivid memories of dropping off film to be developed and it hasn’t been that long ago.

If you are able to look back 50 years ago, you will see that color photographs were almost non-existent. For the most part, Black and White photographs dominated the landscape in the photographic world before and during the 1950s. I’m 54 years old and have all of our old family photographs and I’ve been busy trying to organize them and put them in photo albums. They are all starting to curl and discolor and the best option would probably be to scan them into a digital medium to preserve them for future generations, but there are so many it would take years to scan them all. If you look back even further, you start to see the number of photographs drop off sharply.

Seventy-five to eighty years ago, not many people had their own cameras. I think it was more of a novelty item and most people went to a photographer for their photos. You can tell this is the case because you start seeing more photos taken in settings and less and less snap shots.

Just a little over a hundred years ago, back in the late 1800s, family photographs are really hard to come by. Not many people had them taken and when and if you can find one of a family member it is a rare find indeed. While doing genealogical research of my family I came across one of these very rare finds. A cousin of mine, doing research too, contacted me when she saw my information on Ancestry.com. We started exchanging notes, photographs, and information about people in our family. She asks me if I had the photo of the horse and her grandmother. I told her no, I hadn’t seen that one.

Her grandmother was my great aunt on my father’s side of the family. Based on the age of the little girl on the horse, we have dated the photo to about 1897. The little girl was born 1 March 1892 and we estimate that she is about 5 years old in the photo. My cousin didn’t know the other people in the photo but as soon as I saw it I could place the house and knew were it was. My second great grandfather lived in that house until he died in 1909. He was born 24 February 1824. I have never seen him before but I’m sure that this is he sitting next to his grand daughter on the horse. It’s a rare look into the past that not many people get to see. It is a photo I will treasure for the rest of my life.