[JKCalhoun]

I have become the self-appointed steward of the family photo archive after my aunt pulled a suitcase stuffed with photos out from under the bed in the spare room in her trailer.

The suitcase's original owner, another aunt, "Aunt" Faye, had lived to be 103 years old but had never had children.

And so I got to work scanning I believe over 500 photos — the earliest a tin-type from 1890 or so. Many were then cleaned up in Photos — levels adjusted, scratches and imperfections "healed" digitally. In time I was able to scan more photos from the family and increase my collection. Likely over 1000 now.

Some photos had something written on either the front or back and I also dutifully added metadata to the digital photo describing the text written.

At this time too, I had begun doing some genealogy on Ancestry.com.

As I pored over the photos, trying to determine who was in the photo, where the photo was taken, I began to "know" the people — family dead even before I was born. I could recognize them then. It became easier to approximate the date of the photos too: looking for young relatives in the photos, guessing their apparent age, knowing when they were born from my genealogy.

Eventually they began to sort: first a young Gertrude standing awkwardly in the tin-type as a child, another studio photo and she's about to become a teen, then with her sisters as a young woman, married, with her own children, in her new dress, with her daughter and her daughter's husband, on vacation, with her grandchildren, white-haired with her daughter - now old herself. Finally her headstone.

Entire lives, captured in photographs. And interleaved with the children they gave birth to, who too grew old in photos and also died — and in one case leaving, as it were, a suitcase of these photos that would come to me.

The connectivity of family back past 100 years has never been made so real to me as it has through photos. Maybe I should have been able to see that continuity in the absence of family photos but there they are.

And as I get older I do consider more and more those not yet born. I suppose this digital legacy is one obvious example. I have been spreading the photos as far and wide as I can, not just to far flung relatives but also to Ancestry.com, Find-A-Grave.com, etc. Surprisingly, I have already had relatives I did not know existed reach out to me having stumbled upon some of these photos on Ancestry and Find-A-Grave.

Family photo calendars I created for a few years were sent to two dozen relatives. I have a "family photo album" I am now assembling — I hope to have it done in a year or so and print a few dozen through Lulu.com or similar and send those out to as many relatives who want them as well.

[strawberrypuree]

I find your perspective and interest in your genealogy fascinating, primarily because I don’t share it. Like, not one bit, and I’m not sure why. If I found out tomorrow that my parents weren’t actually my parents and I was actually adopted, I would have no interest in finding my “real” parents. I’m also totally uninterested in having children — it seems like something other people are much better suited for and I’m happy to be on the sidelines paying taxes or pitching in to a nephew’s college fund.

I’m also not interested in having my photos included in family histories, or indeed being remembered at all. Not in a bitter way, just in the same way that I’m not interested in which mushrooms grow in Botswana. It’s a thing that I think is perfectly reasonable to be interested in.

[JKCalhoun]

I had no interest in genealogy until I had children of my own, got to be 50 years old.

It occurred to me that my parents would be dead one day and if it were to fall to me to tell the grandchildren the family origins I would be at a complete loss. I had relied on my "elders" to have that knowledge.

Ancestry and the like makes it easy to reconstruct your family tree even if you are starting with almost no knowledge. But there's the oral tradition of "your great grandmother's first husband died in a hotel from the gas lamp fixtures leaking" that would have been a lot harder to have found.

So I did find a sudden interest in genealogy. Or maybe it was a sense of duty or obligation — but that quickly did in fact turn into an interest.

Perhaps if you never do have children you might also never find an interest in genealogy.

I'll say this though, I have not fond any interest in finding genealogical connections to famous people. Nor have I had much interest in going back more than 150 years or so. I think the photos uniquely draw me into the lives of the generations captured in them. And perhaps because they are photos, not wills or marriage licenses, etc., I am come to feel either the futility and brevity of life or, at other times, the wonder and often humble dignity of it.

[WarOnPrivacy]

I felt the same way for most of the same reasons - plus other reasons like my father was about as bad a person as is possible. So I had not only disinterest but some reluctance to make sure I stayed disinterested.

In late 2017, I grudgingly promised a sibling to piece some of our extended family history together. In 2018 I found a lost sister on Ancestry. And then I found a cousin who pointed me to my last surviving aunt (who I visited in 2019 and who passed 6 weeks ago). I also reunited with another lost sister. The sisters and I talk most days.

By the end of this year I will have added about 10k names in Family Search and 15k-20k in Ancestry (w/ much overlapping). It's safe to say my interests changed. I'm not saying I think yours will. Certainly my genealogy numbers don't represent anything likely.

What I can say is that things change, sometimes unexpectedly.

[tony0x02]

I've been thinking about doing the same thing. Do you have any advice before I start?

[mattbk1]

You don't have to put your tree in Ancestry and pay monthly, especially if you have hosting somewhere. Webtrees is good software. If you are associated with a university, you may have access to an Ancestry subscription for free through the library. Set up a system for digital files and naming conventions on your local machine to back up any documentation you add to an online tree. Family tree software should all operate with the GEDCOM format, which makes it really easy to move around if you are dissatisfied (although objects like photos may be harder to).

When I started in high school 20 years ago, it was just a tree of everyone I knew I was related to. Then you get back far enough and have to ask people for help. My grandmother remembered dozens of names and dates, which got me further. Ancestry and similar free websites (findagrave.com) can fill in a lot. Newspapers.com helped me find a ton of obituaries and gossip column entries, which filled in even more.

It's only recently that I got into thinking about the "History" going on around my ancestors when they were alive, and that's been driving my interest for the last year. Person A lived in this place in the 1890s--what was going on there, and how were global events affecting them? Newspapers.com or another archive were very useful for this as well.

Although Ancestry and Newspapers.com are subscription, even one month lets you dig into and download as much as you want, so if money is tighter you can sign up for a single month and dedicate a lot of time to getting as much raw material as possible.

[1MachineElf]

I have some questions for you too. I have a goal of digitizing photo albums, photo slides, VHS, camcorder tapes, and 8mm tape reels that had been kept by my grandmother.

What software tools did you use to organize your archive?

How did you add the metadata?

[JKCalhoun]

For myself, I used Apple's Photos on the Mac. Of course you could use Lightroom, etc. but I am swearing off software subscriptions.

Get Info in Photos and add all the metadata you need.

For myself I try to set the date for the photo — at least get close to the correct year. I set the day/month/time to something like January 1, 12:00 AM as a sort of indication that I have no idea when during the year. And if I am not even sure about the year I indicate as much in the description for the photo.

I enter a description (on export this will populate either one of the EXIF or IPTC properties or both). I describe what was written on the back and/or front (if any). Describe who I think the photo is of, maybe where the photo came from, etc.

I add keywords. Keywords for each person I recognize in the photo, keywords for the collection the photo came from, keyword "Family Photo" so I can differentiate from all other photos in my library.....

Any decent photo editing app should have a means to set the date, enter a description, add keywords. And all of these are exportable — are part of the EXIF and/or IPTC spec. And, again, a decent photo editing app will preserve these on export.

The beauty of course is that you can then create "smart albums" to show your family photos chronologically where: keyword = "Family Photo", sort by date. Or find all photos of "Faye Coble".

[mattbk1]

This is ahem something I am not good at. Currently I use DigiKam[1] for general photos, but I don't include extensive metadata on files themselves.

All my resources are kept in a single directory, with subfolders generally using "lastname, firstname m" naming. I don't do as much cross-referencing (shortcutting) as I should, but that's also handled to some degree in the GEDCOM and full-text search of the filesystem.

[1] https://www.digikam.org/