Old pictures of everyday life!!! Lack of them in my family

I really enjoy the old pictures many of you guys have of just everyday life in days gone by. There are very few of them in my family. I would guess that the cost was a concern in years past.

There are only two or three pictures of my maternal Grand Father known to exist. There a just few more of my fraternal Grand Father. There are darn few of any older family members.

That is the great thing about the digital cameras in that they are pretty cheap and you can save pictures at almost zero cost.

Now the down side to that. With most pictures saved in some type of digital format and few actually printed, how will that be in the future??? Will a computer of a 100 years in the future be able to open the digital photos we take today??? Will it be like the old 30mm films of the 1950s?? You can have them converted but it is not cheap.

Just wondering about that.

Another funny thing. There are hundreds of pictures of my oldest son. Just about every few months of his entire early life is saved in some photo or another. Then it seems to slowly taper off as we had more children. The youngest has baby pictures and most early birthdays. Then it is mostly school pictures.

My oldest used to tease his young sibling about it. He would tell them that since the first try was "perfect" pictures where not needed for the rest of them. LOL Smart butt.

There are a few of my grandparents, some of my parents and siblings. My great grandparents were poor mine workers on one side, and died young on the other. So nothing of them. I have done some geneology on my family, and was surprised at how many kids didn't survive to adulthood, and how many adults died relatively young. The good old days must have sucked!!

I always tell my two older siblings that almost every masterpiece has a rough and second drafts before perfected.

lol

jt

I am fortunate to have a small collection of old photos from both sides of the family. They could not afford to take a lot of photos but over the years there are a good selection. Its true now it is so easy and cheap to take photos but we rarely print any.
I have scanned a lot of these old ones and made several photos disks to share with the rest of the family and ensure that if anything happens to the originals there will be digital copies . But in a few years will our computers still be able to read the disks?

100 years? Try 25. If you had saved everything on 5 1/4" floppies, how would you read them today?

Last get-together we had, my sister brought out a beautiful picture album, full of portrait pictures from about the turn of the century, by the looks of them. We didn't know who any of them were. Turns out she had been given it by our grandmother, and they had gone through it, and grandma didn't know them, either.

I will agree with what you have said JD. And the part about few pictures of a youngest ,I know to be true. The picture taking was my mothers department at our house. She took many picture of the first three boys, then she got a girl, and well there are almost as many pictures of my sister as there was of my oldest brothers combine. Then came me. Not one baby picture. When I was about ten, my mom was putting together albums for each of us kids, and found this out. She found one picture, a group photo after church with every one dressed up and my oldest brother was holding me on his knee. She got the photo enlarged and chopped so that she could have a picture of her last baby, I was almost one year old in the picture. My wife and I took many pictures of our three boys. I don't hold any grudge against my mom for the lack of picture, I know from my own life , things get very busy after you get the first one.Mom was 45 when I was born, and I guess the novelty had wore off some Heh Heh!

Good old days did suck. Hard work, unrelenting, no health help, danger. Epidemics, typhoid in our little town, was determined to have been pumped out of old City Well No. 1. One great uncle got kicked in the gut at age 15, one frosty morning feeding fodder to a few horses, laid on the kitchen table three days til he died. Other great uncle contracted diphtheria at 14, that was the end of him.

We went through all of our old pictures and wrote on the back of them who was in the pictures because they were all gone by the time our kids were born.

I don't know what they will do with them when we are gone. Daughter has no interest in them; son would take them but he's in AU.

If you have concerns about pic on puker in the future, just take a disc of pics to a photo department and have them printed out.

We didn't have a ton of photos either... mom and dad said it was too expensive to pay for film and development.

Being the 6th child - there were not many pics of me either. So few that the first one was when I was one year old. My ever-loving sibs had me convinced I was adopted for being the reason that there were no baby photos of me. They used to make me cry... mom finally overheard them doing it - she put an end to it.

That has crossed my mind also about not printing off digital pictures and putting them in an album. I very seldom do it because it uses so much ink from our printer. I've been putting them on CD's just to get them off the laptop.

Once in a while I go through the pics I have stored on my laptop and send them to Wally World to have printed. It's really cheap and they are preserved for anyone that's interested to see.

We also have several albums of family members though the 40's & 50's and very few were identified.
It's shame that names were not put on the backside.

Another storage option, may be good for many years, is a usb memory stick. (has several names). I chose that over a disc.

(quoted from post at 12:26:30 12/22/14) Good old days did suck. Hard work, unrelenting, no health help, danger. Epidemics, typhoid in our little town, was determined to have been pumped out of old City Well No. 1. One great uncle got kicked in the gut at age 15, one frosty morning feeding fodder to a few horses, laid on the kitchen table three days til he died. Other great uncle contracted diphtheria at 14, that was the end of him.

Click to expand...

So true. My maternal great grandfather had a coal mine car run into him. Although injured he finished out his shift, went home and died, leaving a wife and seven kids. The family had to break up and live with relatives. My grandmother the younges of the seven was not yet a teen and lived with an aunt until she married another Hungarian immigrant. I think about that when I think my life is going badly and realize it's not.

I was the youngest of five, and remember when Mom got the first camera, when I was six years old. So older siblings pics (few that they are) were from an aunt"s camera. Money just wasn"t spent for that. The old pics I"ve posted here were from Mom"s Brownie camera.

(quoted from post at 09:32:24 12/22/14) We also have several albums of family members though the 40's & 50's and very few were identified.
It's shame that names were not put on the backside.

Another storage option, may be good for many years, is a usb memory stick. (has several names). I chose that over a disc.

Click to expand...

I use those memory sticks for photos and videos too. And then you can play them back on tv if you have a usb port on it like mine.
Used to be most photos were black and white since colour film and developing cost too much extra.

My Dad grew up in a fairly wealthy farm family and they took few pictures....One of the few I have is Dad and his new 1931 Chevy at age 23....In the background is a shed with 2 more cars and a 1929 model 22-36 McCormick tractor..

My Mom grew up in a poor farm family and they took lots of pictures..Heres my grandparents on their wedding day May 6,1892...

As another who has no pictures of my forebears, and the times they lived in (good or bad), I also would like to say thanks to those who are kind enough to share their family pictures and stories. I really enjoy the memories that they recall.
JD-recently heard an "expert sociologist" state that the current times are likely to be less relevant to future generations than the Biblical days were. His theory was exactly as you said: despite tons of contemporary data, it is all stored digitally and unless someone has a reason to put it in "man-readable" format, it will be "lost". Lots of difference in finding an old pile of photos vs. a pile of "discs/sticks" that require technology (and desire) to view.

Do remember the Brownie "box" camera. Mom bought one of the first Polaroid cameras and took pictures of me at summer camp. Was neat to see your picture so fast.

One thing about cameras back then was that they were shot from waist high. Today it's eyeball high. Something you don't think about at the time. I prefer todays angle.

Mark

i inherited the family albums when my grandparents passed away. Last winter I took a couple of bad weather days and scanned the best of them from the late 1800s to the 1950s and created a book using iPhoto. At the moment I can't recall the exact name of the service that Apple offers through iPhoto but the book came out great. Had copies made for all of my extended family for Christmas. Wasn't real cheap but the reward was seeing the tears in one of my aunt's eyes and the hug and thank you.

Even if you don't have family that seems to care, find a way to preserve these photos because they may be priceless to the next generation.