My grandfather, Al, (top-center) poses with all of his childhood friends. He tells me stories of playing games in the dirt with their pocketknives, which by the way, all of them carried. How times have changed...
One of my most recent photo projects, is scanning and cataloging old photographs my grandfather took when he was younger. He had given me a box full of negatives back when I was in high school and for whatever reason I didn't start really going through them until this past fall. They are all in black and white and from the 1930s-1940s. They range in subject anywhere from friends/family, to still life, landscapes, etc. Some of my most favorite ones though, are of my grandparents shortly after they were married. This one was taken in the early 40's.
Here's another one. My grandmother in front of my grandfather's first store. He sold linoleum, mattresses, bed springs, rugs, and more. Look at those prices! This one was probably sometime around 1939. They were married in 1940, 3 months after my grandmother graduated high school.
For those of you that don't know me, my family has owned a hardware business, since 1912. My great grandfather (fathers side) started it. It is currently still in business. In or around when these photos were taken, my grandfather had a disagreement with his father and started his own store about 20 blocks away. It only lasted a few years, then he ended up going back to the family business.
It's incredible looking at these photographs, knowing what I know now, almost 70 years later. Since going through these negatives, I have searched for and uncovered hundreds more negatives, slides, and prints that my grandfather has taken over the years. Some are color and some are black and white. I've learned so much about my family and it's past while uncovering it all.
As I continue to work on this massive project, I will be posting more photos, some with full blog entries, others just with some captions. In the meantime, I urge everyone reading this to go out and learn as much about their family's history as possible. Find any old negatives your parents or grandparents may have, ask them anything they remember about them, record those conversations if you can. I guarantee you will find out things about your family that you never would have guessed.
Feel free to post questions about uncovering your family's past, comments on my photographs, or anything else.
This past summer my Aunt's niece came from France to stay with us for a month. She's about the same age as my sister, Jessa. Since she had never been to the U.S for an extended period of time, we decided to take her to as many of the "standard" American sights as possible. One of the obvious sights is the Statue of Liberty.
I, of course, being the travel junkie that I am, couldn't pass up this photographic opportunity, especially since the last time I was there was probably elementary school.
When you're that close to something of such importance to this country and the world, you can almost feel what our grandparents and great grandparents felt when immigrated here.
Recently, I uncovered and started to catalog some of the photos my grandfather took when he was younger. The majority of them are from the 1930's-1940's. I will post more as I go through them, but specifically he had a few that were taken of the Statue of Liberty. It's pretty cool seeing photographs that I took, next to his, taken over 70 years ago.
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