When Daddy died we had a mountain of paper photos to go through, and quite a lot of them got dumped. The kinds of photos that got dumped were pictures of places and people that none of us knew, or pictures of my stepmother’s brother-in-law’s family whom we didn’t know either. They had no kids, so there wasn’t someone who would show up later looking for them.
There was a whole album of photos from my Dad’s retirement party (in the early 1980s) that were badly composed point and shoot shots of people being silly with the hired belly dancer. My dad’s former coworkers, none of which we knew.
Saddest of all were the photos of my step brother, the family black sheep. He died of complications of alcoholism at 53, and had no kids. Some of us took one or two of him, but the bulk of them, especially baby pictures, went unclaimed. Ouch.
Now, this is not to say that we didn’t swoop in and enjoy most of the photos of our own childhoods and early adulthoods. I took most of them home to digitize and 5 years later I’m still working on it.
I’m also going to scan and organize all the photos I took prior to going digital. Sometimes I wonder if I’m nuts. Will anyone want them or will they get dumped?
Nina does seem to enjoy the scrapbook pages, even though she didn’t like the idea of making them when I was doing them. I guess it’s time to get back on that project soon, right?
