Flickr
My sister loved taking pictures.
She died in 1993 before Photoshop, Picasa or flickr were out there. She never had a laptop or a real cell phone. She never saw facebook, although many of her pictures are on there – on other people’s pages.
Her daughter has told me that she feels lucky to have all of the family pictures that my sister left behind and painstakingly captioned. Almost every picture has a date and names on the back. It is as if she knew that she would not be here to say, “Oh that was when Aunt Millie and I drove to Kingston”.
My sister loved taking pictures.
She died in 1993 before Photoshop, Picasa or flickr were out there. She never had a laptop or a real cell phone. She never saw facebook, although many of her pictures are on there – on other people’s pages.
Her daughter has told me that she feels lucky to have all of the family pictures that my sister left behind and painstakingly captioned. Almost every picture has a date and names on the back. It is as if she knew that she would not be here to say, “Oh that was when Aunt Millie and I drove to Kingston”.
Both her daughter and my daughter inherited her love of photography and the recording of family history. After our family reunion in 2009 they set up a new facebook page, dedicated to my father’s family so that the aunts, uncles, and cousins (there are 40 of us) and all of their children could keep in touch. There are over 200 pictures posted on that page now, in various albums (with captions, of course).
I feel lucky that Carrie and Danielle are so talented and think that it is important to keep a family history.
Sometimes it is hard for me to look at those pictures. I miss the people in those pictures who are no longer in this world but I am grateful to have the pictures so that I can remember. (the one at the top is one taken of my sister and Danielle over 30 years ago - Danielle captioned it and has it on her own page).
My sister took pictures of everyday events. She did not wait for special occasions. She would have been a snapfish and flickr queen. I am not sorry that she was ahead of her time, only that she did not have more time.
All of this has taught me to be grateful for the everyday things and not to let life pass me by... that we are constantly making memories, whether recorded or not; things that we will remember and the things that we will leave behind.
Mary Frances Nolan
1947-1993
What a beautiful gift of memories your sister gave the family she was taken from too soon. Looking at a photograph can evoke so many thoughts and emotions sometimes.
ReplyDelete