Throwback Thursday #2 – Sentimental Pictures

Welcome to the second edition of the Throwback Thursday Memory BlogHop where we take on a nostalgic object, event, or memory and blog about it.

It’s Thursday, and I shall be providing the topic.  I will alternate hosting with Maggie from From Cave Walls We will post a blog with the title Throwback Thursday  – subject of the week. (This week the subject is sentimental pictures..)

How to Participate:

It’s very easy! Write your own post about the subject and share your own memories or experience about the topic by leaving a pingback to this post in the comments.

It could even be a story about a different sentimental object you were gifted. You could instead, write about something sentimental you would like to gift someone when you pass away. Poems are welcome, too. You can use the photo above in your post and tag it with #TBTMemory or #IRememberWhen to make it easier for others to find.

Or, even easier, if you do not wish to write your own post, feel free to tell your story in the comments below!

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Today’s subject: Sentimental Pictures

What pictures were you gifted? Did you ask for them or was the gift a surprise? What did you decide to do with the pictures? Did you give them to other family members?  If you were not gifted pictures, were you given other sentimental items? Do you have any items you want passed down to family or friends? Have you already let them know what you will be giving them?

I will add my story to this post. I hope to read many of your experiences soon. 😉

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Whenever the opportunity presented itself, I enjoyed talking to my mom and my aunt about who was shown in their old, treasured photographs. My aunt was great about typically jotting details on the back of her prints. At one point, she had box after box of photos in her storage unit. When my aunt and uncle moved from their home into an assisted living apartment, my uncle looked through the boxes. He gave me the few that were not ruined. I held on to them, as my aunt and uncle were dealing with more important issues at the time.

For Aunt Addie’s 90^th birthday I made a photo scrapbook for her. It was a gift of love. The hours I spent sorting through pictures and making an album, I learned so much about the “prim and proper” woman I had known all my life. She had been so adventurous as a young woman. She left New York at 17 and came to California by herself to become a nurse. She had many wonderful careers over her lifetime. Her photos were a key to who she was. They were priceless.

Aunt A moved several times in the last years of her life. After my uncle passed away, she had to move again to a residence with more assistance. At every move she made, her photo album remained on her bedside table. She insisted each care giver look at who she once was. The album brought her joy. Photos have a way of doing that. I am grateful that I ended up with the album as well as the rest of her photos.

My aunt passed away in January. She had Covid at the time. Her room was quarantined. After two weeks, an employee from the residence went in, gloved and masked to go through her belongings.  My cousin and I had a  Zoom call with her to go through everything. It was an emotionally difficult day. There were pictures everywhere in her room, along with the album I had made. We requested all the photos and the album be placed in boxes for us. I also asked for her costume jewelry so I could make a decorative bowling ball as I had done with my mom’s jewelry. After another two weeks in quarantine we picked up the boxes. It was a hard realization that at 95 her important items fit in two large boxes.

I am now in the process of going through the rest of her photos not used in the album. There are  some photos I had never seen before. An especially meaningful one is of my grandfather as a little boy. He is one of eight surviving children pictured with his mother, stepfather, and grandmother. I hope to use the names listed to aid my search on ancestry. These pictures mean the world to me. They are a key to my past that has been hidden away. My grandpa as a child.

My grandparents dating and engagement photos.

It has been six years since my mom passed away. I have all her old photos as well as the numerous albums I made for her. My brothers had no interest in the pictures. I have yet to put all her pictures in albums. It is still difficult for me. I have looked through them on occasion and have been surprised at the photos of her marriage to my bio-dad. The numerous stepfathers are there in the pictures too. I am not sure how I feel about keeping those. At some point, I will construct a memory photo book of my mom’s life. Being given photos has been the most important thing I have been gifted from family members.
My mom pregnant with me.

Me, my friends, and my mom when I was in high school.

I am unsure if my daughters or grandchildren will want my photo albums. I don’t know how important the family history will be to them. When I look at the shots I took in the 70’s, I get nostalgic. It seems like an eternity ago. I have other items from my family, but the photos are what I appreciate the most.

My older daughter as a toddler and my younger daughter not yet born.

Will my now almost 50 year old daughters want these photos when I am gone?
I am not sure.