Roots

My Great Grandfather Harry Trout

Those of you that are around my age are probably the last generation that will experience the thrill of going through our parents old albums and shoe boxes that are randomly stuffed with decades of snapshots.  Many of these are of us, when we are small.  I can remember many many of those pictures.  I even duplicated a few with my kids.

My Great Grandfather Harry Trout (Again)

But my generation has created most of our kid's pictures in the digital realm.  This has both advantages and disadvantages.  Our pictures will never fade.  They will never get bent.  The negatives won't get lost.  But, poor backup strategies, dying machines, pictures never taken off of phones, passwords, and other issues could prevent our kid's from really seeing these at all.  We do print some things out, but they are usually the "best", and are rarely the everyday randomness.

 My Great-Great-Great Grandfather Etzler

This isn't that big of a problem though.  When you think about it, us, our parents, and our grandparents ( maybe ), are the only 3 generations in history that have had that chance.  Go back further and you are lucky to even have any photographs at all, and slightly further still and the art wasn't even invented.

My Great-Great-Great Grandmother Etzler

The photos in this post are pictures my family has from generations past.  I had a chance to photograph them and put them into the digital realm.  I don't know the processes involved for all of them.  Some are clearly pure photographs.  Others seem to have some photographic properties, and also clear brush and ink work done on details.  But, I think they started as photos.

My Great-Great-Great Grandmother Mary Catherine Crum

I have captioned them with identities as well as I know.  Others in my family can probably fill in details on some first names, and how narrow down the dates.  Some are clearly older than 100 years.