Old photographs can be fun. Going through them to bring back memories and talk about the past. But they can also be a challenge.
I was looking at a couple old pictures with my mother the other night. She’s generally pretty sharp for someone in her 90s, but even her memory fades a bit. There were a couple people she couldn’t remember. Eventually, after tossing around a few possible names we figured out who they were. Since we manage to solve the riddle, it turned out pretty good. But it could have gone then other way.
At one point my mother mentioned that her mother had always told her that she should write notes on her photos, just for future reference. Now with old photos, you know, real pictures printed on photo paper, it’s pretty easy to write something on the back and have it bleed through. So you have to be careful not to ruin the actual picture. But it isn’t a bad idea.
While playing the game of trying to remember who was in those pictures was fun, it’s not much fun if you don’t remember who some of those people were. You probably have their picture for a reason. While I always thought I have a pretty good memory, it does have holes. And those holes are getting bigger as time goes on. So making notes on pictures might not be a bad thing.
And with the move to digital photography, it’s not tough to add a few things to a picture, just to jog your memory. Then you just have to hope you can remember the password for your cloud account after your hard drive fails.
And by the way, the picture attached to the blog is a stock photo. I just picked it at random. Just in case it’s a family picture of a serial killer or something. It has nothing to do with my family. To the best of my knowledge, we don’t have people like that in our family. There was that one guy who ended up in jail in Boston for selling a “cure” for cancer many, many years ago. But we don’t have a picture of him. At least, not that I know of.
