Back to the Project

Have you ever been involved in a project, been interrupted for quite some time, then tried to go back to it? This is, to me, the most difficult part of sticking with and completing a project.

Sometime before the holidays I had to clear all my old-photo-books-to-new-scrapbooks project off my kitchen/dining table. There was no point in getting it all out again before the holidays were over, because it would have to come right back off. After the holidays, I had a session of bronchial asthma where for a few weeks I did not feel like doing much of anything.

Now the holidays are long past, I am fine, and it is time to get back to the project and get it finished. But I've put it off and put it off, reading and reading and reading (or listening to) books. The problem in getting my head back in the project is--getting my head back in the project. Where was I? Which photos had I scanned already? Which photos do I have duplicates of? What is the best way to sort the photos chronologically when they are often mixed up in the album--and some are glued in so well that I can't peel them off to put them in the correct order? And how can I be sure of the correct chronology when so many are not labelled? (If there are kids in the photos, I make my best guess by the sizes we are.)

Well, it's easier to just read another book!

But I am taking myself in hand, and I have begun again. One of the first of the little bitty prints I scanned and put through the auto program for improving, was of such poor quality that it seemed rather like a lost cause and a useless exercise to try to save. However, I could see that it was of a fairly large gathering of some of my mother's family--just the sort of photo I do want to save. Someone with real photoshopping skills might be able to get a little more from it, but you do have to have something to work with first. The group is standing on the south side of the Rooney House (as we called it, after the landlady's name). How small this house looks to me now--we lived there from the time I was two until I was nine, and it was much larger then!

For those of you who are family:  Back row--Grandpa and Grandma Mackey holding McLaughlin twins; 

Rose; Red, top of head just showing in back; In front--Dorothy with Michelle; Vera holding Kerry and hand
on Grace's shoulder; Jessie holding Jerry; Terry; Glen, Gary Gilbert, Larry, and Glen (Junior) Rogers.
(Wish I knew who took the photo (Bob?) and where Bobbie is--she should have been there.)

Anyway, here is how it turned out. Not good, but I was able to identify the people in it and make a pretty good guesstimate of the year, which I believe is 1947. Perhaps I am over-obsessed with trying to preserve some of these things. But I see not only an era that is passing, but one that has already passed. And yet that time is part of the history of my sisters and myself. Memories and old photos are links to that past that we lived and that helped form us.