Thinking for a Future Generation

Thinking for a Future Generation

Every other year, my wife's family gets together for a family reunion not unlike millions of other families have done for generations. For obvious reasons, we have been unofficially elected to the post of Official Photographer for the family photo — my bi-annual hat-tip to those who do portrait photography for a living. Here is my image from two years ago.

Nice looking family and the photo turned out reasonably well. But in addition to the catching-up conversations, the hot dogs and potato salad, the yard games and adult naps, there is also always a table where photographs of long-gone family members are laid out for everyone to see. Thankfully, someone has gone through all the old photos and written something on the back so the stranger in the image can be identified in the family tree. I always appreciate this in Maureen's family because I have boxes of photographs from my own family archives that are unidentified and unknown relatives. They exist in a tantalizingly close connection — except anything about who they are, when they lived, or how I am related to them.

So, with this in mind, we've taken this to heart and started to add identifiers to our family photos — something that might be useful for future generations. It's easy enough to do in Photoshop and just might make our family portraits more meaningful if they survive 100 years into the future. Here is an example.

Simple, but might just be appreciated by some distant great-grandchild who is not yet even a twinkle in little Cate's eye.

Comments

[Steve Kane]

Great reminder, and especially so in this day and age, when a huge percentage of photographs are never even printed. A printed photo, at least, has a back that invites the scrawling of names ...