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Taylor Family, Christmas 1973
And a good Saturday morning to all as we come to you once again from hard along the banks of the mighty Little Manatee River. I arrived back in Florida last Saturday afternoon after having spent the last seven months in New Hampshire dealing with my sister’s estate. I still have a number of big tasks to do with the estate and her trust but I can do them from down here rather than staying in New Hampshire. Plus, I was finally able to sell her condo and no longer had a rent-free place to stay.
Through everything these last few months, one of the more surprising tasks I’ve found has been identifying people in pictures and passing the pictures on to the appropriate individuals. Some, like this first picture, are easy. This first picture to the right is my family from a Christmas Open House we had in 1973. That’s me at the left in a fairly standard pose from those days with both cigarette in one hand and beer in another.
Dub Taylor looking at his great-great nieces circa 1983
I’ve been able to do reasonably well at identifying pictures of family members. Even when it is a picture like this next one, to the right, of my father looking down at three of his great-great nieces when they were young. All three of these little girls look enough like they do today that I was able to identify them.
The problems start with pictures like the one of my sister and her high school classmates showing off their tattoos they had all gotten during one of their Halloween party trips to New Orleans. Even though I’m sure I know most of the classmates, I don’t know them all as adults.
Then we come to the pictures of her friends and acquaintances that might have been neighbors or co-workers at one time. Some are folks I do recognize but damned if I can come up with names. Others are people I have no clue who they are and where they fit in Cissy’s universe.
Since I have been back in Florida, I’ve been looking at all the family pictures I brought with me, as well as all the ones I already had, after the folks had died. Sometimes I can identify everyone in a picture (especially when it was a long- time family friend who I could see their later years) but often it is someone I do not recognize at all.
I’m as guilty of this problem as anyone. I have found pictures from my high school and college years where I have no idea who everyone in the picture is. And I know that I am in pictures taken at parties from college, USAF years, work parties, and so on where someone has picked up the picture(s), looked at me and wondered “Now, who the feck is THAT.”
So pull up a chair and let’s talk about getting those pictures labeled so that you and your family aren’t totally confused.
98 Comments
Welcome to Saturday morning
Thanks, dakine01, oddly I’ve just finished tracking down and identifying a man who looked startlingly like my father, in a photo of a ceremony of import to the Chickasaw nation. We discovered at last that it was actually some one else, but as he had worked in purchasing land for what is now Lake Texoma, and some Chickasaw lands were among them, it was quite possible for him to have been there. The Chickasaw Cultural Center in Sulphur, OK, where I came across the photo, has very fine staff who finally identified the man who resembled but is not my father. Another good reason, though, for listing people in photos while your memories are fresh.
Good morning dakine and thanks for the post. Nice topic. We now have hundreds of photos on the computer, none of which have descriptions. The time it would take to fix that…….(holy crap)
Good morning to you sir.
When I send pictures out of my family or my children, I always make sure to scribble a note on the back. Just the year, the month (or more often the season) that the picture was taken, and who all is in it.
I hope it helps folks avoid problems down the road.
As for my personal photo collections, everything is either digital, or in scrapbooks that my wife lovingly crafts. Her scrapbooking method includes a step of writing the names of those in the picture on the back.
Got my parents pics (mostly 1930s) in order & labeled to the best of my & my mother’s ability before she died in 1990.
Going thru my stuff now.
Got my parents’ expense books to find.
Contact at SUNY-NP thinks they might be donatable to NYS library under guise of history of 99ers.
I think for many folks going forward in this digital world, it may be easier to flag and tag photos. But as oldnslow and Ruth Calvo note, there is a whole lot of things from early years prior to today where the pics require a lot of effort to update
And just think of the hundreds (thousands) that are not on the computer and without any descriptions…
When my dad and then later my mom died, my little brother got that task. It would have been silly to leave it to me because while I’m quite good at recognizing faces and putting memories to them, I’m horrible at names. Just horrible. I’ve been at my workplace for going on two years now and I called one of the guys in prepress a totally different name than actually belongs to him just Wednesday. If I had gotten that job, I would have labeled the photos, “that guy who used to hang out with (my sister), the one who used to smoke on the porch” and so forth.
Good morning!
Good morning stranger. We have missed you. Hope you are well.
Yeah, I now have pics from my mother, father (WWII) and even grandparents that I have no clue who some of the people are. And some of Mom’s cryptic notes aren’t much help in identifying who and where
Good to do, and I am guilty too, it’s so easy now. But I am coming across incidents that show I’m unusually long of memory, and realizing that it’s not a good practice to expect that of others. Labelling more now.
That is so like me. “You know, that guy, that we met at that place, you know, where we did that thing.” :)
Must be a younger brother task as I got the bulk of the pictures after the folks died as well. I did a brute force years ago getting them out of the albums Mom had thrown them in but then life intruded and I never got back to them until now.
One of the big problem areas is all the pictures Mom had from my high school days. I can recognize a lot of my fellow former cadets but there are also a lot of “who the feck is that?”
Now there’s a scary prospect. I’m picturing shoe boxes full of receipts. Honestly, working as a paralegal, I once got a whole bunch of those to use to establish real expenses. Awful.
The CBL has wonderful scrapbooks from her world traveling days and can identify every person in every picture. Without fail. I have the opposite memory.
They guy with the pants?
Just a drive-by, because I’m on the way out of town for the weekend. Some years after my ex and I split up in 1990, he gave me and both (by then) grown kids albums of photos. I’m not sure how he had wound up with all of them, but he had spent some months going through and sorting them for us. I’m sure he kept some, too.
But I don’t think most of them are labeled with names. That would be a good project for me when I have some idle time over the winter. I probably know who most of the people in the pictures are, but my kids may not. I’m not much of a picture person, but my daughter is, and has hundreds of digital photos. I should suggest she try to label them, if she hasn’t already.
I have some from my college days where “Yeah, he’s the brother of Susan that I dated a few times around this point”
Exactly! We’ll call it “great minds, thinking alike”. ;)
My wife has been facebooking for most of our adult lives, going on 6 years now. She tags everything. Makes it really convenient when going back through photos.
Lost bar at top of screen that enables me to switch from one window to another. Anyone know how to restore it?
Expenses mostly recorded in spiral steno pads. My mother was a secretary.
Ctrl.
It’s a good thing to have, until you run into a completely different version of something you share with some one else, in my case family, and have to bite your tongue because it doesn’t matter, but it’s not the way they remember.
Sorry, should say ‘Ctrl + tab’.
Unless you’re on a Mac. Then only God can help you.
Hmph! Try getting a whole floor dolly full of the those kind of receipts, papers and stuff and making copies of all of them. That job is what made me decide to join the Navy in order to do something less unpleasant for a living.
Is your picture too large on your screen? I generally just get out and reboot.
cntrl tab allows me to tab from one open window to another. Does not how open windows on bar at top.
Oooh. If I hit the Alt button in Firefox it brings the menu bar down. Maybe try that?
Did that twice.
I know you’ve been there with me.
And if that doesn’t work, esc. You may have inadvertently entered a full screen mode. Escape usually exits those.
You raise the cursor up to the top of the screen until a small bar appears. Click on the little box.
When I was in jr. high and we had to wear those stupid navy blue slacks and white shirts…
We used to sit in the bleachers during assemblies and yell “Hey! You in the blue pants!” and sit back laughing at all the idiots who looked.
*Sigh* Good times.
Not sure anyone would agree in my case. Slow mind may be more accurate. :)
Nope.
Too much trouble to fool around.
Will come back later to see if anyone knows how to restore it.
I know it’s easy, just don’t know what the right combo of clicks is.
Sounds like you’ve probably got the right info by now, but if you move the whole screen down by getting hold of the blue speck left up top, you can make it smaller. Is that high tech language or what?
Got it!
Thanks very much Margaret.
Kinda like walking into a biker bar and saying hey, the black streetglide left the light on. (20 or 30 guys head to the parking lot)
Happy to help. :)
Yeah, well, accuracy aside, “great minds” sounds better…
You just reminded me of a fellow student whose nickname was ‘Chick’. Every time I said, Hi, Chick! every girl in the area gave me horrified looks. I learned not to use his nickname, just say Hi.
Lol. That’s great.
I’ve got a buddy whose nickname is ‘ho-bitch’. That one gets me some weird looks when we’re in public together.
Off to make beef stroganoff for xmas. Going to niece’s and taking it with, frozen.
Be well.
Fun with old photos; when my father died, it was quite unexpected. Not long after, we came across a hidden scrapbook of all his old girlfriends. It’s hidden now in my brother’s attic.
Just drive by…on way to work. Dak, I did not know of your NO connection….I lived there mannnny years from college til much later.
We’ll have to compare memories….those we’ve still got…never sure about NO and memory.
Good Morning All….going to 70s here today…then colder.
I had a Latino friend, (though we didn’t call them Latinos then), whose nickname was (the “N-word”). His future wife and one of my best friends through elementary and middle school gave it to him and it stuck. It didn’t take long to learn to never use that nickname with him in public. These days I understand how offensive that word is to some people and the meaning it carries but back then it was just another nickname, albeit one that could get you beaten up for using it in the wrong place.
I’m not celebrating Christmas this year. I think instead I’ll call it “Saturnalia” just because that would infuriate the Bill O’Reillys in my life.
Actually, I only have a few small memories of NO as I’ve only been there one with my Mom and brother in ’69.
But Cissy and her friends and classmates went a bunch of times around Halloween for quick class reunions and apparently one year, they all got small tattoos…
Yeah, that’s one we didn’t have to worry about.
Could have been named Jesus, you know, that also makes for interesting experiences. And I have a friend who pronounces Juan as Jew-in. Language for fun.
Great place for a reunion, many options….;)
You can put up a tree too, because that’s to keep fleas out of the hut, originally in Jolly Olde.
His name was Pedro and everybody, I mean everybody called him “N***er” or N***er Pete” from the time he was in high school until his death several years ago. I always thought he resembled a Klingon much more though. Of course, I was a Geek, (and “Kang” never stuck).
I have a co-worker named Juan and whenever somebody shouts “Juan” across the room, inevitably one or more persons will yell “Two”.
I’d chime in with “Lost” – but then I can not resist bad jokes, as we all know.
You’d fit right in…trust me.
Need to work on starting the day. Thanks again for the post dakine.
Have a great weekend all.
Does that mean I’m buying?
I have to get a few things done, too. Just a funny aside, since we’ve begun using those ethnic names, my ads are now in Spanglish. I’m blowing kisses to Google.
Thanks for the post n’ host, Dakine01, and thanks everyone for good company.
I’m out as well firepups. Thanks for the post and host dakine.
I’m headed to the Dell Diamond to participate in the distribution day for our local Orange Santa effort. Should be fun!
So is Dan’l happy to be home dakineo1?
Not sure if “happy” is the correct term but he is settling back in. Exploring things once again and wanting to get at the squirrels – S2D2 in other words
I have been talking forever about having “help me” and my name each tattooed on the palm of my hands. That is for whenever you are out somewhere and you have to introduce someone you know but whose name you can’t remember. Then you hold up your hand with “help me” on it and they tell you their name, or hold up their hand with their name on it. Of course having your own name on your own hand might come in handy too, when you forget your own name.
I am totally down with all your great minds thinking alike too. We do that thing all the time and everyone knows exactly what/who/when we are talking about. You know, what’s her name who went with us that time we were eating at that place we all loved.
Hmmm…maybe you should make a trial with henna tattoos first…
LM always kept all the photos labeled. Now when someone posts a class photo from some ancient classroom on FB, if I am in it, I can find the photo in my box of stuff LM saved and it will have all the names typed out. Someone re-posted one of those photos yesterday, and I could come up with one other person I did not recognize at first, but of course I could only remember her first name and had to find an old yearbook that had the last name, which I had to hunt down because I had no clue. I was not in the picture, otherwise, LM would have done the work.
Yeah, I’ve had some of those class pictures posted on FB and had no idea who some of the classmates were.
Or the pic I found from when I was 7 and was the class representative as the “Prince” for the Fall Festival. It has the “Princess” as well but only ID’d as “Linda” (and she left before the year was out and I have no idea what her last name is)
Morning everyone,
I have mostly digital photos in my possession and another bunch scattered around/with backups on a couple of hard drives. I’ve left instructions on how to find the passwords to access two computer hard drives if that ever becomes necessary for someone besides myself. My younger brother and my older sister have the several generations of actual photos cataloged and bound and safely stored. She is a primary school teacher and taught creative cutting and pasting for thirty-five years.
Should have said my sister was a kindergarten and first grade teacher and actually really enjoys making very very professional and artistic scrap books with family pics and mementos. Younger brother has copies of all known genealogical photos stating back about the time my parents were married and he is stretching that research farther back as he has time to.
still knee-deep in the family archive project, oh boy can i relate. stacks of old photos of “Ina and the Kids on the Farm” without a clue who Ina is. one thing i recommend when sorting through boxes of “stuff” is touch everything once before throwing anything out, you never know what clue is hiding that can unlock a mystery.
i recently found a stash of my Grandparent’s cancelled checks from the 20s sent at Christmas to family members as gifts and was about to toss when i saw all the signatures on the back and realized i could maybe match the signatures on the checks with some of the handwriting on the photos.
it’s kind of like a treasure hunt.
dakine, it wasn’t until 1973 that I made the switch to more stylish wire framed eye-glasses, my formerly full thick head of hair was down to the middle of my back by then. When I see the photo like your second one posted, I am drawn to details like what appears to be barn board paneling on the wall, besides the fine looking crew of course.
ha! my brothers had the task of cleaning out my dad’s bureau. we joked about what “secrets” they’d find. when they got to the last drawer there was a small framed photo of a flower. when the turned it over the found a “nudie” pic of a woman from the Gibson Girl-era, very tasteful.
my best guess is he stole if from his father, kinda like my brothers stealing my dad’s Playboys (not for the articles).
The first thing I saw when I clicked over to FDL was that picture and I knew right away that dakine was hosting today. Very recognizable.
That pic was taken in the “sun room” of my aunt’s (Dad’s sister’s) log cabin. The cabin is probably 225 to 250 years old now. Aunt Sara’s son in law found it on a property he had purchased and Aunt Sara was selling her old home after her husband died. They moved the cabin from back in the woods to up near the road, re-modeled it and installed central air and heat and indoor plumbing. One of my first cousins lives there now.
I switched from the horn rims to wire framed glasses about 5 years after you did.
:})
My senior class pictures show the “beginnings,” of an actual mustache on my lip, that a couple of us actually thought were pretty impressive at the time, especially when the HS Superintended had told us to shave them off (we didn’t and no action was taken) we were really convinced it was cool.
I was out of the house very early this morning and have to motivate again.
Thanks for stirring a passel of pleasant memories, dakine01.
I have pictures from the summer between my junior and senior years in HS where I grew my first ‘stache. The hometown was celebrating the 175th anniversary so I had first ‘stache and goatee. I had to shave it off at the end of the summer when returned to military school (though I tried to get the admin to let us grow but they wouldn’t budge)
I grew the first “permanent” ‘stache when I started college, had to shave it off for basic training but have not shaved the upper lip now since January ’77
Several years ago I began scanning some of the old black & white photos of various family members and then printing them on HP photographic paper. After printing them I would place them in custom (read: hand made) frames and send them as Christmas gifts. Folks seemed to love’em. My current project is printing a photo of my great grandfather taken in the early 1880s when he was working as a driver on a Budweiser beer wagon – he was attired in his Sunday best, smiling and looking very contemporary, and the photo is in mint condition.
I have a post group W photo of the flight I went through basic training with at Lackland AFB. I remember the names of two of my buddies then and only their first names. Not a very important picture I guess. I do wonder how many are still with us today.
Thanks for the post and host dakine01
Thanks for the post and the host dakine01. Gotta get onto my chores now.
Because I was a “by-pass” in basic, I didn’t get a flight picture but I do still have a picture of my Tech School class at Shepherd AFB in Wichita Falls.
To be honest, about the only guy I remember from Basic was a guy who was dropped back to our flight and that’s mainly because we wound up stationed together at Wurtsmith in Oscoda, MI.
What form of technicality did they determine you to be most suited to fill their daily needs? I recall my test scores being around 97. So naturally they made me a Po lice man.
Yes, let this be a lesson to us all – Identify who is in the picture.
We have many old family photos but it’s only a guess as to who is who. I myself have a raft of studio cards from the mid to late 1800s that came to me through the family – none of the people are identified, I assume many are friends but we’ll never know. Tragic.
I was a 672X1, Accounting. I went in knowing I would be in the admin field precisely so that I would avoid being tapped as a rivet counter. I was above 95 in each area though I did not have anything other than “it will be admin field” promised to me.
Although, I spent my last year with a “war skill” of Law Enforcement. They decided that accounting, personnel, and admin fields might not be as critical if war came so they gave us 2 weeks training as cops plus 3 days working each quarter. Other “war skill” fields included heavy equipment, hospital, and a couple of other fields.
The theory was if something happened, the Security Police would deploy to wherever, the Law Enforcement would take over Security and the war skill folks would take over general law enforcement duties
Sigh. Late to the PUAC party again. Since my two(round-trip) early morning flights in two weeks I just can’t seem to get enough sleep. Set the alarm and ignored it again.
anyway, Hi, dakine01, great topic and timely for me, too. when I was at my mother’s I had hoped to go over pix with her. She kept me pretty busy but I looked through a few albums late at night after she went to bed.
My cousin who came to visit said her brother visited Mom a year or so ago and scanned a bunch of family pix, getting Mom’s verbal id’s.
She has gone over many and labeled ones that were unlabeled, on her own.
s
When I visited cousins in LA a few years ago, they had albums and asked if I could identify some pictures – my mother’s family, and they had no idea who was who. It helped them know who was at long ago events.
There are also genealogical sites that are open for research on families that are interested.
After my dad had died, my sister and I went through everything. We found some pictures then with no IDs so when we went to Aunt Sara’s for lunch one afternoon, we brought some of them with us. A couple were of her, Dad, and all their brothers and sisters with their folks. That one was mainly to ID when but all she could remember was “Well, it most have been after Yancey (her oldest daughter) was born as I didn’t become fat until then.”
Then we pulled out this one pic of a white haired old man and woman walking along the lane and she exclaimed, “What are you doing with a picture of my grandparents?” Of course, this meant they were our great-grandparents so it was good to get a look at some of those who came before.
90% of our family photos were lost in Katrina. They are all memories now. Imagine the art, sculpture, ceramics, papers and other physical history that was lost in that storm. My relatives outside of La. have sent us copies of what they have. Some of these images we have never seen. I have boxes and boxes of pictures of my little family unit. Have been passing them along to my girls for a few years now.
great story.
I’m an idiot as well on all this stuff…maybe we only get wise to this problem with age.
When my folks downsized to move to the retirement apartment, I went to help, and my dad and I went over a bunch of photos. But fool that I am, I didn’t write anything on most of them. Of course some are in frames, and after all this time, they’re pretty much stuck to the backing paper; you wouldn’t dare take them out of the frames.
So sad, mary. Notice how, when you can – in a disaster such as a storm– family photos are invariably what people grab first when they flee. Of course these days we all have so many, you have to choose, even when you have the time to grab before running.
There’s a story in today’s NYTimes about an artist’s studio building in lower Manhattan that was flooded, with years of work and tools and materials being completely destroyed. Several of the artists in the article are quite elderly, and had to give up on saving things because of physical limitations.
SAC trained killer meets numbers guy. How ya doin.
Hey, I was a SAC trained killer as well. Wurtsmith was 379 Hvy Bomb Wing where I got my first permanent duty station before being rewarded with 4 years at Hickam.
Press the F11 key.
The family picture thing is something my elderly mother has been working on for years. There are various cooperative efforts by the computer-savvy in my family to get them all onto the computer and onto CD.
I think now that we are in the digital age, people take many more photos but print practically none of them. And digital files are really not very stable, from what I have understood.
There is a project in Japan involving reclaimed/found photos from Fukushima, trying to get them back to people who would care about them. Nothing like water to destroy stuff. I have a friend in NY who has been putting a lots of posts up about artists and their ruined studios from Sandy.
Terrible. Listening to Doha info the last few days, it seems clear that what is going on is the marginalization/erasure/willful allowance of death and destruction of the poor across the globe. Climate change is just a vehicle to get rid of human detritus.
Has anyone heard from yellowsnapdragon? I so hope her adventure to bring Hollywood Nagi home is going well.
Uh, never mind. Just found yellowsnapdragon’s post documenting the trip so far.