Since 1998, I've scanned about 4,000 family photographs in my free time. Yes, that's a lot of photographs. If you are ever of a mind to do something like that, it really helps not to have a life. Luckily, I have been so blessed.
It also helps to have lots of old family photographs, but especially to have relatives who have even more old family photographs than my family has. I have actually taken several thousand photos myself since the 1970s, but I didn't include them in my gift. My aunt and uncle wouldn't care about most of those.
Hundreds of the family photos with which I have been working date back to about 1905 through the 1920s. Hundreds more date from the 1940s through the 1960s. Those are the ones that will be going to my uncle and aunt.
In the past year and a half, I have scanned almost 2,000 photos from the collections of two aunts and one great aunt, with about that many still remaining to be scanned from the great aunt's collection. Until last week, I had kept them in separate folders, so I wouldn't get confused. In order to put this gift together, I finally put them all in one folder and spent the last week organizing them and sorting them chronologically (the best that I could), using many different methods of detective work. I found and deleted a number of duplicates. That's not as easy to do as it may seem. Many of those duplicates had different dates on them. One aunt might have mistakenly dated a photograph as 1955, while the other dated it as 1952, so they were quite a distance apart in the folder. Or else duplicates were printed a few years later, and the developing studio would put 1928 on the photos, even though they may have been taken in 1921. It took a lot of searching and heavy use of the amazing indexing/searching/"weeding" capabilities of my Mac operating system to locate them.
I just finished this evening, a few hours too late to get the nine CDs in the mail to them before they head out on an anniversary vacation. It is extremely difficult to time a project as big as this one was. Thinking of it at the last second didn't help either. Oh well, there will be over 1,700 photos waiting for them when they return home. My uncle (my dad's brother) is a big history and "family memories" nut, just as I am, and just as my dad was, so I know he will be having a lot of fun for a while. So will my aunt since almost half of the photos were taken after their marriage in 1956.
My uncle has probably never seen most of the photos from before his birth because most of them came from my great aunt's collection (she should have been a famous photographer; she was way ahead of her time, as far as creativity and subject matter go). There are also many photographs from his sisters' collections that show him as a child and young adult, and he may not have seen many of those since the era in which they were taken.
One nice thing: When I was a kid growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, my relatives got together for a lot of holidays and usually always had a wild time. I have tons of cousins about the same age as I am, so we always had a blast too. Many times, all the different families took pictures at these get-togethers. My parents might have taken fewer than anyone else, or they may have taken more than anyone else. It just depended on the situation and our level of income at a given time. As a result, there have been many photographs in my family's collection that were confusing to me. I grew up looking at them and wondering which get-together is shown in them (the same is true of photographs from before I was born). My parents were famous for never writing on the backs of their photos, so I couldn't tell. Luckily, my aunts' collections include photos of these same events, and there are dates on them. In putting them all together in one collection, I have been able to ID many photographs for the first time since I was a kid. There is some satisfaction in that -- at least for oddballs such as myself.
