Today I stopped at a yard sale without any clear idea of what I was looking for. I was hoping to find some sort of funky tchochkes but the fellow didn't really have anything that interesting. However, I did find this ancient light meter that I picked up for $2 (in the original box with manual and warranty card):
I started thinking about the old photos you can sometimes find at yard sales and junk shops. I once found an old photo album from the 1920s in a junk shop in Seattle. From what I could guess based on the captions, the photos were taken in the Spokane, WA area during that era. At the time, it struck me as sad that there was perhaps no one in that family who had any interest in holding onto the book of photos and the memories of those people. Maybe there was someone who still wanted to know about their now-dead relatives, but because the book had been sold or given away and eventually arrived in my hands, they would never see those images.
I have many old photos from the early 20th century - my great-grandfather was a photographer (as well as a doctor) and took endless numbers of pictures of family and friends. Although I occasionally look at them and ponder who the people might be and what the heck I'm going to do with all the photos, most of the people pictured are lost to time. I don't know many of them and I know even less about their lives. I can only guess their histories by looking at how they dressed, how they presented themselves and the occasional, hard-to-decipher caption. I suppose it's sad but it's also the way of human existence. We might be remembered for a couple generations if someone bothers to pass on our histories. But, after a while, we'll be forgotten. Occasionally, someone (related or not) may see our pictures and wonder who we were, what we were like and how we lived. Then they'll move on to the present and we'll be forgotten.
Here is a question: in the digital age when so few people actually print pictures, how many physical photos will people in the future happen upon in the way that I did with the album from Spokane? The likeliness of someone retaining all my digital photos and actually looking at what I've stored electronically is extremely low. We live digitally in so many ways - email and text messages have replaced letters and postcards, television has replaced family time and conversations, and Facebook albums have removed the need for having physical photo albums. In the future, how will people remember their ancestors without the letters, the stories and the images?
Here is Ellinore on April 13, 1924 - I don't know her last name, her age, who took the photo or where it was taken:
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