Who is that in the photo?

Maybe that is the question you ask yourself when to look at some of the photos that have been passed down to you from parents or relatives who are no longer alive to provide the answer. What is the point of having a photo of someone you cannot identify? Do you throw them out? You cannot do that. You could be throwing out a photo of your great aunt or great uncle who had a major impact on your family’s history. With no good solution, you continue to avoid the issue by putting the photos back out of sight in the attic or basement or closet.

At some point in the future, that’s the question the person going through your photos will confront. Who is in the photo? Why did you take or save the photo? The photo must have been important. And it will not be just one photo. It will be hundreds or thousands of photos. If they do not have a basement, attic, or extra closet, they may have to throw the photos out in the trash. (Photos are not recyclable.) Will they be throwing out an important photo of an ancestor or someone very important in your life? Someone with an important story.

You can avoid the perpetuation of this dilemma. You can contribute to the preservation of your family’s history.

What should you do?

Start small. We all have an overwhelming mountain of photos. We have prints in albums and increasingly we have an enormous number of digital photos. It will be a major project to organize all of your photos. So start small. Start with the photos on your bookshelf. Find photos of your grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, siblings, …. The goal is to create a select collection of the most important photos. The photos you would grab if you lived in an area subject to wild fires or hurricanes and you had a few extra minutes to grab some photos before evacuating.

There are many comprehensive and sophisticated best practice strategies to scan images, add digital descriptions (metadata) to photos, and archive the photos in multiple physical and online locations. That is a major undertaking that I will discuss in future posts. What I am suggesting is that you start small and serve as the curator of a limited collection of family photos.

Write a description of who is in the photo. It can be as simple as writing down the names and relationships on a piece of paper and attaching it to the back of the photo or the frame. Do not write directly on the back of the photo. While adding additional information would be great, start with the basics such as name, position in family tree or importance to the family, dates of birth and death, the event, the estimated date, and other important information.

Family Photo Curator

Again, start small. Find and annotate the photos of the most important people in your life and those who came before you. These are the photos you do not want thrown out because there are no names or other information. At the next holiday gathering, review the photos with family members. They may be able to add to the descriptions.

Think of yourself as the curator of your collection of family photos. Your job is to collect the photos, identify the subjects in the photos, and store them safely. Just as there are specialists in the art world, you are specialist for your collection of family photos. Hopefully, a younger family member will become interested in the family history and volunteer to become a successor curator.

Next steps

Once you have completed the above process, it will be time to consider additional steps to preserve your photo archives and associated information so they can easily be passed along. Those next steps include scanning the photos, attaching digital descriptions, and finding a online site for sharing and archiving. There are online sites that will facilitate the collection of input from other family members. More on that in future posts.

You may also want to consider a life story legacy video as a way to document your important family photos and stories. We start with identifying those bookshelf photos for use in a video as someone tells life stories on video. While names are important, it is the stories associated with an individual that are most meaningful to future generations.

For more information including sample videos, see my website at www.LifeStoryLegacyVideos.com. Feel we to contact me. We can schedule a time to talk about the process.

Bryon