I read an article recently about the quantity of family photos we accumulate in our lifetime. I think it said somewhere around 1,200 in any given household, the majority of which are unmarked. I can believe that—the unmarked part especially.
I'm horrible when it comes to jotting a note on the back of my photos. "My photos" refer to the ones that were taken by me or a living member of my family. I even have photos undeveloped from the 1980s, but I intend to get them developed "sometime real soon—as soon I get a chance."
It's the same story with my hobby photo collection, which contains tens of thousands of photos. Most of the photos are of note-less, name-less faces. If it weren't for the photographers' marks, they would be of nameless, placeless faces. I refer to these nameless, placeless photos as "incredibly lost."
I wonder why many of our ancestors didn't put names on their photos. Was it laziness? I originally blamed sloth, but then I changed my mind. If you look on the back of c1900 onward vacation snapshots, you can find notes like: "This is Uncle John next to Harvey Johnson's Boat," "Those mountains behind me are the High Sierras" and "That's an Esso station were we stopped to fill'er up on our way to Lake Henry." It takes a lot more time to jot down "where" and "what" notes than it does to jot down a "John Hancock," and most vacation photos have something written on them. Yes, I've concluded that it was not laziness.
After thinking for a while, it hit me. Why would we even bother to write our names on the back? We all know who we are, so there's no need to jot down a name when we already know what that name is. Besides, if people we don't know look at the photo, why would they even care to know who's in the photo? Unless, of course, they're curious about that gas station, in which case they could turn the photo over to find out that it was somewhere on the road to Lake Henry.
So here they sit: all these photos from the 1800s and early 1900s with no clues as to who most of these people are. Personally, I want to know who they are, as I'm sure many of you do, too. Unfortunately, some people discard their nameless photos. Fortunately, some people find them.
Even more fortunately, the Internet has opened a big, big door. Now we can scan those found unknown "genealogy orphans" onto our computers, post them onto DeadFred.com and increase the chances that someone will help fill in the blanks. It happens every day now. Who would have thought?
Anyway, I'm going to get those 1980s undeveloped film rolls developed real soon and share them with you. I might need some help identifying a few of the people in them.
