A Glimpse into the Past...

My Uncle Eugene was the last family member to live in my Granny's old house in California. They bought the house in 1965 and moved from LA to Lakewood a year after we did. This became, for about 3 years, my and my sister's home away from home. I remember walking there at lunchtime to make my grilled cheese sandwiches, then walking back to school - elementary school! And we spent every school day there after school as well as my mom worked in a dental lab.

Well, Granny died in 1994 which left Grampa and Uncle Eugene. Grampa lived til his 92nd birthday in July 2000. So then it was down to Uncle Eugene.

Uncle Eugene never married nor had any kids and was always taking in strays - people strays, that is.

I'm not sure what the living arrangement was for the 8 years until his death in June of 2008. When he died I believe there was him, his girlfriend and a couple other people that needed a place to stay living in the house. He did a good job of taking care of everything until he got too sick in January of that year and the place began to fall into disrepair and neglect.

So in November of 2008 we, Mom, Dad, my sister, her husband, Mom's cousin, Rick and I had the job of cleaning out the place. That was QUITE a job and I blogged it pretty thoroughly, look back at these links to see that story...

When I returned home I brought back my uncle's HUGE van and filled it with treasures from the old homestead.  Furniture, artwork, knick knacks, etc.  All old memories of my childhood.  I also brought a shoebox full of pictures and negatives, mostly negatives.

A few weekends ago Sarah was here with some old photos from her mom's side of the family and Rick was scanning them for her.  My appetite was whet.  I looked at the shoebox of old negatives and decided it was time to start scanning.

Well, I think it was last week some time that I finally finished and it came up in conversation so I had to get a rough count - 1200+!  I knew it had to be over a thousand.  Wow!  But what gems I found in that shoebox!

I was used to seeing my mom's pictures of certain places and events but a lot of these pictures I'd never laid eyes on, they were my Grandma's, not my Mom's!  Things I'd only stored in my mind were now presented before my eyes, some of them were things I hadn't remembered at all and some I only had fuzzy memories of.  Such as a visit to Canada to see my Grandma's sister's tobacco farm when I was about 5.  I remember visiting a cemetery, in my mind it was right across the street from the tobacco farm.  I don't know if it was but what I didn't remember is that we visited my great-grandfather's grave!  And there are pictures of Kathy and me standing by it.  I also found pictures of a flood in LA in 1954, the car that my parents drove to Albuquerque, my mom's graduation, my other grandma holding me by a Christmas tree, a birthday party for possibly a cousin when I was just a toddler, and so many others I can't recall.

Most of the negatives were in pretty good shape but some, the older ones, meaning the ones I was the most interested in, from my mother's childhood, had begun to degrade.  I was trying to discern what seemed to make the most difference.  In one package I found some that were very degraded right next to others that were still well preserved.  It seems that those exposed to air had degraded.  Those that were tightly sandwiched together so as to not allow air between them were still fairly well preserved.  The two pictures to the left of this paragraph are an example of this, they were from the same event and were in the same envelope of negatives!

So now I have them all scanned and have begun the touch-up process, some of it is actually done at the time it's scanned.  I have a long way to go.  But it's all worth it.