I acquired a collection of family slides at an estate sale this past weekend. Many are "red border" Kodachrome 35mm slides which puts them at pre-1960. As it turns out, many were from the late 1940's when the original owner was stationed in Occupied Japan at Camp McNair around 1947. I'll be posting some select picks (and pics) in the following weeks.
First up is this photo of a bountiful feast. The color and composition of this was striking to me. The original owner of the slides, Milton Gast, is center.
The feast includes some home canned peaches along with Ritz crackers, Snowflake saltine crackers, Hunt's canned pineapple, Armour canned tomatoes and Snider's chili sauce. There's a can of Del Monte with unidentified contents and another home canned jar with possibly pears.
At first I didn't notice there's someone sitting off camera, his legs in the foreground.
I'm often asked why people wouldn't want their old slides/photos/films. From experience, I can say it's different reasons. Sometimes there's no one left in the family. Sometimes family is estranged and have no desire for photos of their parents. Sometimes they simply didn't know they existed and they weren't involved in the planning of the estate sale. I like to believe (and have confirmed numerous times with estate sale planners) that the estate sale companies always check with the family before putting personal items such as these in the sale. A while back I bought a family's 8mm films. I actually tracked down the daughter of the family and she confirmed she knew about them and simply didn't want them as they had already transferred the films to DVD.
Of course, should someone from the family come across this post and have an interest, please reach out to me in the comments below.
Everyone else, stay tuned for more upcoming 35mm slides. Oh, the suspense.
i love, LOVE stuff like this. what a find. it's like slices of history that we weren't taught in school. I have pix i got from some thrift store that were of some guy who was in Hawaii during WWII. i always wondered if his family had anyone who cared that the pix still existed, but i searched and searched and couldn't find anyone. kind of sad. but at least they live on for as long as i have them.
ReplyDeleteSomething is up with blogger replies. I know I replied to this as well. *sigh*
DeleteWhat I said was...
Yes, you almost get a sense of responsibility to complete strangers' personal photos/films/slides. I have 2 diaries written by a woman when she was a teenager. I don't know what to do with them, but I can't throw them out.
Yeah, it's rough enough that I have stuff from my family dating to the 1800s (that nobody else in the extended family wants). What will happen to it? And then when I come across things that clearly are part of another family's existence there is, as you said, "a sense of responsibility." Which isn't the same as knowing how to carry out that responsibility.
DeletePerhaps they just don't care - the younger generation does not really seem to want a lot of old stuff. Like my husbands old family photo albums from England - they are a lot of people he never knew so I can't see my daughter being interested at all in pictures of "randos" (random people).
ReplyDeleteYes, even my mom was that way. I'm the family historian and it kills me that she threw out photos because she didn't recognize the people in them. It is possible to put the puzzle pieces together sometimes and figure out who someone is. I've done it. If you know who the people are in your albums, it's possible there are other descendants that would love them. There are groups that will accept old photo albums if the people are identified and they will find descendants.
DeleteYou are a curator of history at this point.
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