My brother and I promised to keep my mom’s home intact while she lived. We probably should have fudged that a bit.
The process of sorting and sharing a life of 90 years is a lot of work, including trips to the St. Vincent DePaul store; moving furniture to family, friends or donation centers; sorting mountains of papers; and, trying to find great grandpa’s beer glass.
I spent an afternoon just going through an extremely large box of photographs.
Like many seniors, when my folks traveled, such as to Alaska, 90%+ of the pictures they took were of the landscape. Just a few pics were of them, their friends and other people. Sorting through those albums went quickly. Then I worked a vein of snapshots from family events. Birthday parties, graduations, Holidays, family reunions and the like. Many of those I put into stacks for different cousins and I’m now getting those to new homes.
Next – and probably the largest number – are posed photos of family members. My mom, of course, had a special multi-photo frame with portraits of all her grand dogs. (They all loved Camp Grandma.) She also had a collection of our family portraits going back to the late 1950’s. School pictures too, plus formal retirement photos and group shots from weddings.
Also in the box were photos from long ago. An aunt’s first grade class photo with about 60 kids looking straight ahead and a stern priest on a chair in the center. Studio photos of my dad’s mom, probably from around 1900. My grandfather and his older brother, taken before the 20th Century. Several pictures with just dates on the back – 1912, 1931 or such – with no other information on the back, the subjects so obvious to the family that the names weren’t written down. (A prior generation had “x” on my aunt in that first grade photo.) Pictures were rare and precious back then, at least for working class families. Kept and treasured.
Today? I have 1,530+ photos on my current iPhone.
Thanks to electronic photography billions upon billions of images get taken each day.
Yet, how many get captioned with e subjects identified? And, how many will still be around in 100 years?
Remember, since about 1965 music has gone from vinyl albums to 8 tracks and cassettes, to CD’s and now to streaming. Each innovation made music more available. Yet if I want to listen to my dad’s Broadway Camelot record with Richard Burton I have to hope I can find a record player with a decent needle. I haven’t had an 8 track since my 1972 Dodge Demon. Our old stereo (think: Carter) has a cassette deck but tapes don’t age well. I still have a CD player at home and in one car – though cars are now phasing the players, and AM radio bands, out. Streamed music, unfortunately, lacks a physical status. How long will the electrons all line up?
In other words, despite an explosion of photos taken and music shared, the next generation may not have the ability to visit the past in pictures or music. All those new wonderful memories exist just as electronic phantoms. Our past could become less recorded, less remembered, than our grandparents’ time.
That first grade photo, meanwhile, will probably be in some family member’s home.
Glenn