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Have you ever opened an old photo album or box of old pictures from your grandparent's generation and wondered who the people in the pictures were? Unfortunately, our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc. were as careless as we are about labeling the pictures we take. After all, I know who the people are in the photo. So, why bother?

Fortunately, or unfortunately, pictures outlast us, but our memories don't, so we end up leaving behind a trove of photos full of, by now, nameless faces.

However, there are ways to identify people in photos even if the photo is 50 - 100 years old and one way is by showing the picture to people in the family who are older than us and are closer to the people in the photos. One technique for doing this is to sit down with a grandparent or great aunt or great uncle and show them the pictures, asking questions as you go along. With luck you will find that they will often either recognize people in the photographs or recognize or remember something about the situation (wedding, anniversary, birthday, holiday, etc.) when the picture was taken which will give you evidence to use when talking to others or searching other sources like old letters, diaries, etc. With even more luck, the picture will spark memories and you may get some good stories as well as identifying people in the pictures. My sister, in an article
she wrote, suggests taping (with permission) these interviews so that you can record the information and stories even if they talk faster than you can write. While the tapes may be looked upon simply as a tool for gathering the information, if stories are involved, the tapes themselves could become as valuable a family treasure as the pictures.

As children, by brother and I got my Uncle Willard started on his World War I stories and taped them on my father's old reel to reel tape recorder so that we could remember them. The tape got put away and twenty some years later my transferred the stories to a cassette and sent it to me. My uncle had since died, so I put it away and saved it. A few years ago, with the tape getting older, I transcribed it to save the stories and then, last year I got a program for my PC to handle recording and used the program to digitize the stories on the tape. I then burned some CDs and shared them with my cousins and with my mother's cousin (my Uncle Willard's son) all of whom appreciated the memories of Uncle Willard and his stories.

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