The Loss of Family Photographs

Many families have some collection of old photographs that have been handed down over time.  Whether you want to believe it or not, many of those provide significant insight to place and time.  In regards to place, you may notice the landscape, the land, the house, the neighborhood, vacation spots, buildings, and architecture.  In regards to time, you may notice clothing, furniture, relatives, events, cultural practices, and occupational practices.

I will show examples of these from my own family archives in my next post.

What are the types of loss? I will detail what I mean by lost.  Perhaps a collection is lost to memory.  Nobody in the family of the collection knows the names, dates, or details of your collection of photographs.  Without connecting to another source that may explain these, they are permanently lost to context and connection to family.

Next there is lost to the trash.  Many collections get thrown away from junk removal services or families are cleaning out their homes due to a move or otherwise.  If these are already lost to memory it makes it more palatable to just get rid of them.  Once these are disposed they are gone permanently with little to no chance of recovery. My recommendation is keep them and try to restore the memory through other relatives or donate to a historical society or collector though the family memory is lost they may still have much value because of the documentation of time and place.

In many instances digital files are thrown away by way of flash drives, hard drives, and other storage mediums or are no longer compatible to current technology or may have been deleted from the operating system.  Files loaded to the cloud or file-sharing services may be lost due to forgotten passwords that were never passed down to other relatives.  Files may be saved under an obsolete format that cannot be recovered. The good news is that many files can be converted, migrated, and recovered, but may require specialized expertise to complete these services.

Moreover, you have lost to decay or neglect.  These would be collections that either have their context detailed or not, but regardless they are rapidly decaying due to neglect.  Neglect in the means of storage, neglect to environment, improper preservation tactics, and little resources to digitally capture these photographs and even less resources for restoration of collections.

Whether you have analog photographs or digital photographs you are still faced with loss.  The best way to preserve is to document the details of your collections, share with interested family members, and make backups. 

My encouragement to you is to do the best you can do.  Focus on the resources that are most important to you and your family as a start.