I happened to choose the album of my father's sides of the family for this first foray, but the album was all mother's doing, and for that I am grateful.
This is an early portrait of my dad. It would have been taken in 1913. It was sepia toned, but with old photos it is difficult to know what the exact original toning might have been. We know they were sepia but just how sepia were they? Usually, I convert them to black and white and then re-tone back to sepia if I so choose, which I usually do. So I have done a sepia version of the photo, but I like it a little better in straight black and white.
Cecil was 4 in this next and final studio (that I know of) photo. According to the note, he was 4 years old, so it was taken either in late 1916 or sometime in 1917. I like this one slightly better restored back to a sepia tone than in black and white. Note that he's on the same chair as in the baby photo.
Perhaps he was 5 or 6 when this snapshot was taken of him looking shy with a family friend. This one was quite faded, but I was able to bring it back to some degree.
My dad's final photo for today is a school class shot. I will peg it circa 1920. Cecil is third from the left in the third row. I know this because my mother drew this in pen with an arrow on the original. I did keep a digital version of her scribble too, and of course, her notated version is back in its spot in the album.
Finally, I have a photo of his father, my grandfather, George Stanley Rayner. I was christened with the same middle name as he, which I was not always pleased about in my younger days. I still don't like it really, but my grandfather was called Stan, and not George, by his wife and friends, so it was a good name for him. This photo was extremely faded, so this was as far as my skills would take me. (I saw from this that I had a little trimming of the edges to do, and I have now done that, but I'll leave it this way for this post.)
I like doing my bit to keep up what my mother started back in the day, not that I think it will mean anything to anyone else once I am gone. But I'm not gone yet, so it means something to me now.
We try to hard to keep photos and all. I have a huge box of my husbands photos that are in disarray. When I say huge I mean 2.5 feet by 2.5 feet and full!
ReplyDeleteBut it will mean a lot to those grandkids of yours later.
ReplyDeleteThe kids will appreciate the photos in time!
ReplyDeleteYou wonder what they'd think of being looked back on by people after their own time.
ReplyDeleteAn interesting subject. I have raised small interest among siblings, children and grands. By small, I mean minuscule. Once in my childhood, my dad snatched back from me a picture I'd picked up in a trunk of his. It was his confirmation picture. Half a century or more, when my brother passed away and my brother in law sorted through his leavings, there was an envelope with my name in my dad's handwriting. There was that picture and the very few snapshots of his siblings as children. Pictures are such an interesting mystery.
ReplyDeleteSuch charming pictures. I need to do the same thing with a daunting number of albums.
ReplyDeleteI love old family photographs and have a treasury of them, from my husband's family, from my family and from my birth mother's family. Photographs somehow make more real a person you have never actually met. I try to have my grandchildren see some of my photos, and hear some of the old family stories...It just takes one or two in a generation who have that interest and things will not be so quickly lost.
ReplyDeleteIt's difficult to figure out what to do with them, other than scan them for posterity!
ReplyDelete