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Photos Of The Past…

When my grandmother’s house caught fire a few years ago, we were notified and drove there right away. Upon arrival we found out she’d passed away. Once we were allowed to go inside the house, we quickly got to work trying to save some of the more important things inside the house.

My grandmother was a “hider”. She hid things all over the house, from money to jewelry to who knows what. Only she knew where everything was. And even then, we weren’t too sure she really knew where EVERYTHING was.

The thing about a fire is that once you notify the insurance company, they send out a team of people to clean up the mess. These people swoop into the house and quickly begin boxing everything in the house up to have it sent to a place that will remove the soot and fire damage done to whatever is salvagable. Since the fire was contained to the kitchen, everything in the house was pretty much intact. It was a different story for anything in the kitchen, which was prety much melted. Even the refrigerator was melted. Wierd.

Anyhow, before the fire cleaning experts came in, we wanted to make sure we’d collected certain things from the house. Mainly family photographs, jewelry and any cash we managed to find hidden inside pockets, purses and drawers. We didn’t find much in terms of cash, which we now think might have been taken by the fire cleaning people. She also didn’t have much in terms of jewelry, since she’d sold most of it off to friends over the past few years. And the photographs, while not many exsisted, we did find a few albums and whatever framed photos were around the house.

The point of this, is that my mom has been holding all of these photos for the last few years until her siblings could get together to go through them. This easter they’ll be doing that. Going through the handful of photos that are left and taking what they want.

Last week I took a handful of them and started scanning them in so that I’d have copies of the ones I felt were important to my family history. There are photos of my mom as a young child, which she’ll probably get anyhow. More importantly though, are photos of my grandparents as teens and young adults that I really wanted copies of. It also got my started on a new project to create a family wall of photos going up our staircase. I want to convert all of the photos to black and whites and then buy black frames of different sizes and shapes and place them all over the wall. I think it’ll be neat and a good way to fill an empty wall with family memories.

For now… I’m busy getting them scanned in.

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