Last year I was loaned some vintage family photos. One was my Great Grandparents and their 6 children, with spouses. I knew is was likely taken in 1916 as one of the wives died in 1917. This winter I was looking at some vintage newspapers, and saw a story telling of a little Coers family reunion, where a photographer was called to take photos. The date of the reunion was Sunday April 23, 1916, photos taken by W.E. Mickle. Highly likely to be the same picture. Tonight at the Emden Il Historical Society meeting, they showed pictures that were made from some donated glass negatives, found during a house remodel at the town just south of Emden. One of these is the SAME PICTURE! So 4 weeks short of 100 years, the story has come full circle. 4 generations latter, I saw the negative that was exposed on that day. What an incredible find, what a treasure!
Wonderful story Dick! Are you functioning as the family historian for the family? My mother over the last 15 years has been gathering information in conjunction with a cousin of hers, and they had a family history published in book form. Preservation of family artifacts and getting the story behind them can yield a lot of interesting history.
Your post sounds upbeat and I do agree that you have a real treasure on your hands........no telling what additional things might turn up in time as well.
Great story Dick. I hope you have gotten some of your old images copied in digital form, because even the best of those images are slowly degrading.
Ive got a good friend in my small hometown whom for years has been going around to estate sales buying up all the old pics. Every year during the "Hogskin Holidays festival" she covers all the walls of the County Courthouse with some of them.
There were some old panoramas that i took shots of, that someone else had done a zerox scan of back when that was the latest greatest technology, so they could write a number on the face, to index a list of names of the individuals. Even as bad as that scan was compared to now, I could make out details on it, which had already faded and lost on the original.
I hope someone makes prints off all those glass plates. I have a friend Peter Miller, who bought a bunch of boxes of them after an old photographer up in Heber Springs passed. The photographers name was Mike Disfarmer. He ended up turning it into a book, and a traveling exhibit. It has shown at the ARkansas Art Center several times, and has been shown all around the country.
Disfarmer was an eccentric and did nothing to pose his subjects. He would go into another room to operate the camera, so you got to see a certain raw intincity of the people as they felt when they came in.
Thanks for the comments guys. I have become the family historian, we didn't have one. My Grandfather died 15 years before I was born, and I had never seen a picture of my Great Grandparents. Really only saw one picture of my Grandfather, his wedding picture. My effort is to rebuild the past as much as I can, really to see if I can know a little about the elders I never met or heard stories about. The vintage photos showed up from collection of another branch of our family. I've scanned many of them, cleaned up a few in IPhoto, and post regularly on a family page I made in Facebook. We have descendants all over the country reading that now, people I knew nothing about either. My big goal is to build a diy scanner to preserve newspapers from the little village my ancestors are from, also where I grew up. There is a forum group called diyscanner that supports people that build rigs with digital cameras and glass plattens. They claim 600 pages an hour for books, but my work will be much slower. It's a nice hobby, keeps the mind busy, and it's a little like treasure hunting.
