Mystery Box
Still sorting and scanning through my great uncle's slides, I came across somewhat of a mystery box. On it was just the date July 1971 instead of a number and a location out west like the rest of the boxes. The box itself was a different color and shape. I took out the slides and held a few up to the office light and saw lots of people in them which made me excited and I ended up scanning every single one.
Above is a picture of my grandparents, uncle (not great uncle who took the picture) and mom. Although I suspect the picture was taken at my grandpa's farm, five or six miles north of where I spent the bulk of my childhood, I'm not sure the reason for the photo. Everyone is dressed up but the focus of the photo seems to suggest the root cellar was the focus, perhaps the rusty pipes laid upon the door. My mom was nearly not in the picture.
Root cellars are nearly extinct these days. Most houses in the region have storm protection from full depth basements and cold storage in the form of freezers, refrigerators and modern canning techniques. We also buy more things fresh from grocery stores instead of trying to preserve them long periods of time. I always remember trips into the root cellar as being scary things because the chances of seeing a snake or large spider was quite high, not to mention they were always dark and dank smelling.
My grandpa decided he wanted to become a farmer and bought a farm near some friends of his who lived in SE Iowa. He farmed it for a number of years but decided farming life wasn't for him so moved back to the city life in NE Iowa and left my mom, newly married, behind. I'm guessing she didn't like farming at that time because she soon moved off the farm and it was sold. Later, that obviously changed as I spent most of my life growing up on a farm five or six miles south of this one.
This one still exists and on a rare occasion, I drive by it, usually when we are in no hurry and doing a "Sunday drive". I have no memories of this farm though a handful of pictures exist of me inside the house or close ups of me at various points outside. Searching through my memory though, this is the only picture of the homestead on the farm from a wider perspective. It looks a lot different than it does now. The house looks quite a bit different now having been expanded several times. The vehicles parked in front of it are also 50+ years newer as well.
Finally, above is a picture of my uncle holding the yellow bladed paddle and I think my grandfather. The grainy structure of the slide doesn't allow me to zoom in enough to tell for sure but just from the shape of the man, I'm fairly certain it is him. I am also fairly certain I know what "river" they are floating on. Although the name of it has river appended to it, I think of it more as a seasonal creek. It tends flow during the spring and summer months after rains but by fall and winter, is reduced to pools that one has to drag a canoe between.
Once when I was probably around the age of my uncle above, my younger brother and I canoed a stretch of this creek when it was flooding with water. The river flows clear across our county and the part above I'm guessing was the part near my grandpa's farm which I don't have any experience with. The part I canoed, would have been several miles down below this photo.
I should mention a little housekeeping. All the other slides I have shown thus farm were untouched other than scanning and cropping to their edges. These I ran through Lightroom to adjust some of the setting to brighten them up a bit since they were all faded from time. I don't normally do this for pictures posted on this blog but these felt special and thus deserving of some extra treatment.
Love the old pictures, and the stories that go with them! The first one is very mysterious. It's funny that it features the doors so prominently, and if that was the focus, why put the people in it? Killing two birds with one stone, I guess. LOL
ReplyDeleteI treat many of my old slide scans in Lightroom, both to brighten them up and to do color correction and take out weird blotches and fibers and that kind of thing.
Seeing this post again, a week or so after writing it, I almost wonder if the camera had been mounted on a tripod of some sort and slipped after it was adjusted and a timer set. Back in the day of 35 mm film, one wouldn't notice it until the slides got back from the developer. This seems like a more logical solution than they were intentionally taking a photograph of the root cellar doors.
DeleteI am all in favour of doing some restoration work on faded and scratchy old photos.
ReplyDeleteI am too I guess, although I didn't remove any of the scratches and artifacts.
DeleteThanks for sharing Ed.
ReplyDeleteThis is actually very useful to me as well practically speaking. I have two sets of slides from my parents for trips we took as well as slides of my own that will need converting.
I converted the last many years ago. But somehow, more boxes, reels and other things seem to gravitate my way asking to be digitized and preserved.
DeleteI really like that last photo! It's such a peaceful scene.
ReplyDeleteIt probably wasn't. That creek, nearly dry these last two hears, has lots of fencing strung across it so when I paddled it, occasionally we came across them all full of sticks and debris and had to make the quick decision to go under or climb over it. Going through it and not making it was certain death by drowning.
DeleteIt's fascinating to step back into the past through photos, especially when they elicit our own memories. My mom threw out a bunch of our slides because "no one will be interested in them anyway." Needless to say, I've had a talk with her about waiting for me to look at them first.
ReplyDeleteMy grandmother gave me a huge box of 4x6 prints when she was still alive and said nearly those exact words. For the most part, she was correct. 99% of the photos were of scenery while they were vacationing. Occasionally there was one, usually a birthday or anniversary celebration with several generations within the photo, that I would pull out and scan. I hung onto them just in case my grandmother wanted them back before she died. Now that she has passed on, I will probably honor her wishes and give them a toss, keeping those 1% for the next generation.
DeleteYou are such a diligent researcher! I have boxes of old photos - before digital cameras and such, as well as boxes of slides. It is too daunting a task for me to learn a new skill but I don't want to toss these valuable bits of history back into boxes for my kids to deal (trash) with. How should I start - getting a slide scanner that converts them into jpgs? Any suggestions? What if 90% of the slides are totally not interesting?
ReplyDeleteWell to be honest, no research went into this post. It was all memories pulled from my brain and applied to a few photographs.
DeleteI guess my advice would be to first come up with a long term plan before you start digitizing. Just digitizing them onto your computer is not enough, especially if future generations don't know that or how to find them. All mine are on my computer but also backup to the cloud so should the computer tank, I have a backup. My wife and kids know about them and hopefully will be able to access them long after I'm not. But as a fail safe, I am gradually putting some online and also making online books that I have printed out and can give to my children. All the precious physical photos have been organized by family and are in plastic totes up high in the basement.
I started by buying a flatbed scanner. Mine is a CanoScan 8800F which also allows you to scan 4 slides at a time or you can fill up the bed with photographs and scan them. I have all mine saved by family surname on my harddrive. For example, in my folder where I keep all my digitized photos, I have a subfolder for my Kuck family. Within that folder there will be more subfolders by every generation of the Kuck family. So my great great great grandfather Kuck has a folder along with my great grandfather Kuck. I put the scanned images in the appropriate place. Occasionally something comes along like my great grandfather Kuck's World War I picture album and I'll great a subfolder specifically for that so those pictures always remain together for context. I usually name them something generic to keep them in order and then append them with more information. For example: "Picture 032 (Grandpa, grandpa, uncle and mom). The next picture will be Picture 033 (Kuck farm). The numbers keep things in order and yet the extra words give me something to scan or search for when looking for a particular picture.
I don't do every picture, and in fact, I don't scan most of the pictures in some cases. I just scan the ones that interest me which I hope will also interest others. Mostly those are pictures of people in my family or of places that have meaning to those people such as farms, pets, vehicles, etc. Thus far, once scanned, I have held onto them mostly because I have room. Some I have given the hardcopies to others in the family to do as they please. Many of the ones I didn't scan, I simply tossed. As stated above, they are mostly scenery pictures of vacations that meant something only to the picture taker and nobody else.
Feel free to send me an email, recycled(dot)thoughts(at)gmail(dot)com and I will be happy to write at length about any particular part of this process you are interested in.
Thanks for the offer and info! One of these days when I am ready to tackle this chore that is not that important but a bit of a shame to put it aside.
DeleteIt's remarkable how well those pictures have been preserved. I love the one of the guys in the canoe. As for the first one with the folks gathered around the door to the root cellar, at first glance (for a nano-second) I thought it was a gravesite!
ReplyDeleteThese have been preserved inside the original cardboard slide boxes inside a larger cardboard box that probably sat on a shelf for the last 60 plus years. Perhaps a little bit of luck thrown in there as well.
DeleteI use Photoshop. I haven't heard of Lightroom before. I looked it up and it's very intriguing. I scanned all our old photos, but I haven't looked at my mom's photos. Something tells me I should.
ReplyDeleteLightroom has more features but it probably overkill for just doing small changes like correcting fading and such.
DeleteYou really should look at your mom's pictures with her. My mom wanted to do the same but wanted to wait until my brother got there too. By the time he finally got there, she was too far gone to look at pictures anymore. It was a golden opportunity now forever missed.
Oh gee... It may be too late for me too. In the last couple of weeks, we're noticing even more dementia. I'm wondering about that Memantine the doctor put her on.
DeleteDuring the last few years of my grandmother's life, medicine seemed to affect her memory greatly. Whenever she controlled the pills, her memory faded. Whenever someone else like my Aunt or a nurse controlled the pills, the fog lifted for periods of time. But I always suspected that the medicine in general, just played a part as well. I guess it is just one of the negatives of living a long time, one has to sacrifice other aspects of living.
Delete