A large, sagging cardboard box, a massive plastic tote, six shoebox-sized plastic containers, and two slide file boxes stacked in a leaning tower yelled at me for more than a decade. Amid that jumbled pile was my ancestors, my relatives and my family’s visual history waiting to be sorted, scanned and organized for display and distribution.
It took a night to do a quick, rough sort.
Ancestors were separated by family line. Any ancestor who wrote on the back of a photo scored major smooches from me because facial comparison and adding or subtracting years of aging left me tired.
The seven decades with my parents and six siblings was broken down by the six different towns we called home. I had to laugh when I caught my new parents making dozens of photos of their first two children and left me searching for a single image of my youngest sister as an infant – she does not appear until about the age of three.
The further back in time, the fewer the photos.
The late-great 1000 Memories website created a graphic that showed how photography grew exponentially by the decade until the emergence of digital photography about 2000.
Early on the expense of making snapshots competed with housing, clothing and food. Toss in a Depression, then World War II that restricted the availability of cameras and films – the materials were needed for the war effort – and making photos was limited. If a family had a camera, it only came out for rare Kodak Moments, a snapshot or two, then put way.
But I began to notice a marked difference in the number of photos from the two sides of my family.
My maternal great-great-grandfather started three different newspapers. His son O.T. – my namesake – became an engraver and photography practitioner. They understood the importance and immediacy of images.
O.T.’s son, Ollie, picked up photography and documented his courtship, a summer working at Yellowstone National Park and fishing adventures with his pals. Ollie’s daughter, my Mom, went into communications, and I went into photojournalism.
From that lineage and my entrance into imaging on film, digital, web and video, this screams genetics.
So why so few family photos from my father’s side?
It took some prodding, some questions and a great-aunt – whom I never met – to fill in the blanks into my Dad’s family past.
The lack of images came from the breakup of a family. My great-grandfather and his second wife sent my grandfather, my great-aunt and four other siblings from his marriage either out on their own if they were of age, or off to be raised by relatives.
I never made the connection to this clan until I was well into adulthood, and my father was thrilled to connect with his family history, to a German immigrant couple who were early settlers of a Minnesota region and he went off to become a Civil War veteran.