At this part of the scrapbook, Grandma must have been bored with labeling the photos because she just stopped. So here I am with a bunch of photos with no idea who any of these people are. Maybe someday I’ll be able to identify a few people but until then, I can just identify my Grandma, Loraine Gunzendorfer.
Look at this beautiful dress and great hat!
Now she did a little labeling but, of course, I knew this was her.
I should be able to figure out who these kids are – maybe I can find a photo of the house and make a guess as to who they are.
Aren’t these two adorable? If I didn’t know better I’d think the child on the left is Grandma’s brother, Wilton Gunzendorfer. But it doesn’t fit based on the time period the photos are from.
This couple is interesting. Another beautiful hat!
Is this girl the same as above?
An old fashioned picnic! I think that is Grandma sitting third from the left.
I wonder what these people are looking at?
And one more group shot, this time from the front. I don’t see Grandma here.
This photo is classic - what is she trying to say? Did something happen to the missing person? Could that have been an unflattering photo of Grandma that she never wanted to see again? These little cryptic clues just make my imagination wander.
While I’m so thankful for the photos Grandma did label, these unlabeled ones sure are frustrating!
Debi, I share your frustration at the joy of receiving old family photographs--but finding no identifying labels! I'm still working my way through a box of them, myself.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I did find that, the more you stare at them, the more you shuffle through them, the more likely your eye is to pick up seemingly invisible hints--similar borders, the same landscape or same group of people. That's really all we have to go on, but whether it provides enough of a clue or not, at least we can get a better feeling for what it was that surrounded our ancestors during the prime of their lives.
Agree with Jacqi...and I find too that you need to look & keep looking until you get to know all the subjects, thats what I do with all the unknown Albums & Pics that I buy,in the end you recognize things that you didn't see the first time round, maybe same shoes,a hat,hands touching :) Wonderful pics, Lynn
ReplyDeleteI agree with Jacqi. Keep staring. Keep analyzing details. I have photo albums and college yearbooks that belonged to my great aunts Violetta and Velma. So I keep comparing photos to ones in the yearbook. I've identified a few people that way. Now that I've confirmed the face of Velma's best friend Olive, I'm seeing Olive everywhere! And while you might not know who that girl in photo #5 is, I'd say definitely she's the same girl in #6, as well as the girl on the far right of the last photo.
ReplyDeleteReally beautiful pictures. I am going through the same thing--a couple of albums and a box of wonderful old pictures and no idea who many of them are! I look at some of the pictures I have feeling like in many cases that the photos are the only thing really left that represents that individual and their life and it just pains me to not know who they are. Good luck!
ReplyDeleteThe hardest part of all of these unknown photos (and there are A LOT of them) is that the individuals were obviously very important and yet I don't know who they are. I've indentified a few of them when I've run across a newspaper article or obituary, one of which was my great grandfather! But I do love seeing my grandmother at play as a young woman.
ReplyDeleteI made an index in Excel of all of my family photos, and I studied all of them at the same time (over a period of weeks--it was a monster project). It really helped me date things and figure out who was who. I could compare the jewelry worn in one photo to that worn in another to date them, or seek out house numbers in the background, or look at the growth of the background foliage to determine when it was taken. It's time consuming, but if you look at them all at once, you start to see tiny clues that help enormously.
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