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Window On Main Street
(by Barbara Christian - July 23, 2008)
Family archives renew memories
My sister Carole, God love her, is organizing the family archives. By that, I mean all of the photographs that have been stored for years and years in hat boxes on the shelf of the hall closet in our parents' home.
From the contents of those boxes, my sister has created order. She not only ordered photo albums chronologically, but she has captioned each of the pictures then noted the relationships so future generations know who was who.
And when a photograph stirred up a memory or family story, my sis wrote it down and added it to the album. My sister is older than I and missed the whole computer era, so the writing in the album is in her familiar round and graceful hand.
As in every family's picture collection, there are images of people who no one knows. Mystery souls who invaded the family snapshot for only a moment and then slipped back into anonymity, leaving the nagging questions, "Who is that? Does anyone know who this is?"
Today, the neatly ordered albums hold pictures of us and our parents from infancy through childhood to adulthood. And, of course, there are the family stories she has written down for posterity.
The photos she has arrange on these album pages begin with our great-grandparents and include relatives from my mother's and father's sides of the family. There are vacation pictures and pictures taken at family reunions, weddings, family picnics, graduations and baby pictures of people who are no longer with us.
One album contains photographs of our family home being built during 1938 to 1940. A steam shovel is shown digging the foundation.
Then Carole made individual albums of photographs of my brother and my families.
But my sis does not see this memory collection as work or something that had to be done, like cleaning the bathroom. She talks about it as excitedly as anyone putting together a family tree. Our genealogy just happens to be done with photographs, captions and anecdotes.
It has been a lot of work. Solitary work that came with some perks, Carole said recently. So, what's the perk? Time travel, she said. The photos of people and places are so immersing, and so intent is the album work that Carole says she often finds herself so deeply focused on the past that it takes her a moment to return to the present.
As the albums are completed, they are returned to the shelf of the front-hall closet in our parents' home for anyone who wants to take them down and look at them. The closet has been renamed "the family archive."
Although it was Carole who spent hours and hours arranging the pictures in the album, she is the first to agree that they are not hers. No one owns the albums.
So, how do you thank someone who brings order to decades of hat-box chaos. Something simple seems appropriate.
Thanks for the memories, Carole.
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