Old Photos, Old Memories

For the past few years I have been working on creating new albums for some of the old family photos. Some of these photos were handed down in our family, some were from an old album of our Mother's, some I even found on line, where they had been posted on Ancestry by other descendants of some of my ancestors.



A.G. "Red" McLaughlin, mid-1960s. He would have been in
his 50s. This is a pose very familiar to me.

Many of these photos were very small, had some flaws, or just needed a little brightening or other touch ups to bring out the picture more clearly. I scan these types of photos, work on them a little, and make prints for my new albums. I try to include as much information as I can about each photo, so this family history is preserved. Often dates are missing. Then I give it my best guess--and it has certainly taught me to date my own photos as I go along! I used to think I would always remember the occasions when I took photos; as I got older, I realized that I should have been dating things and I am careful to do that now.

When our Mother died, my eldest sister, Terry, undertook the job of going through Mother's collection of photos and separating out those that applied to each family (plus some that were more general) so that we each would have some of the originals. Others she scanned and has posted online so we each have access to them.

The two photos I am sharing today were in my packet of photos from Mother's albums. They were not dated, so by "internal evidence" my best guess is that these are from between 1964 and 1967. These two photos match in the type of paper they are printed on and other details, and I am sure they were taken the same day. If one of my sisters can date them more closely that would be great.

This was the companion photo to the one of Daddy. Obviously, we did not know we were being photographed. Mother (Rose) is about to take a sip of her coffee, Kathleen has her eyes down or closed, and I am gazing off to the side. But this photo helped in figuring out the approximate date of the pictures.

Visiting the Past

While my feet are firmly planted in the present, I always enjoy the visits to the past that photographs provide. So much would be forgotten without those pictures that freeze a moment of time.

I started re-doing our mother's old photo album over a year ago, because it was falling apart. Most of the photos aren't dated and don't have any name identification on them. Fortunately, I know who most of the people are. They are the people who populated my childhood. I removed the photos from the old album pages for ease in scanning them. The tiny size of so many of the old ones from the 1930s and '40s makes them hard to see detail, especially with my somewhat compromised vision. By enlarging them, I can see so much more.

A bonus to removing the photos has been discovering that Mother had written notes on the backs of a few. They seem to be the ones that she sent to her folks to see and then return and, later, the ones she sent to our father while he was away in the army. I love finding those notes from our young mother--I just wish there were more of them!

Today I will share more of these "noted" photos.



Dorothy Mackey and Rose McLaughlin. It must have been
a Saturday, because Mother has her hair pincurled and
tied in a scarf. This one didn't have a note, but its companion, taken
at the same time, does. This one just happens to be a little better quality.

Take two from that same day in 1945. the note on the back of the photo
reads: "Terry took these of me and Dorothy. Sweetie slipped in again.
Ain't she cute?" (I had to enlarge and lighten the picture to see that I
was, indeed, lurking behind Mother.)

On the back of this one, Mother wrote: "Gracie took this.
See my new shoes." I think this is probably from before
the leaves came out on the vine in 1945.

By the way, if you didn't know it was 1945, wouldn't Dorothy's hair and pants outfit look completely modern?