As some of you may know, we went to Ireland for Christmas to spend it with hubby's family. His parents literally have hundreds of family photographs from different times. They are all kept in boxes up in the attic, and that's where I keep my 'treasure box' (not a box with treasures, mind, but a box with little things that are extremely important and valuable). So every time we are over for a visit, I like going up to the attic and rummage through boxes of stuff and look through old photographs. I could easily spend hours up there if I wasn't called down for tea))
This time was slightly different as I discovered 2 very old photographs. One dating back to approximately 1910, and the other one (seemingly taken on a wedding day) to 1920. As long as I remember myself, I've always been fascinated with old photographs. I always wanted to know who were those people in them and how they lived. I took these photographs and a couple of old albums down with me, and for a couple of evenings the whole family was sitting down and looking through them. Hubby's parents were remembering who was who, what happened when etc. We discovered a photograph of Michael's grandfather from 1950 taken in the UK during his work on the construction of a tube station. The background behind him is plain and there's pretty much nothing there. We were wondering what tube station it was, and how it looks completely different these days. There were wedding photographs of Michael's grandparents from 1960. A photograph of his great-grandparents from approximately 1920. It was taken in America on their wedding day. It's a simple photo, however, I could look at it for ages examining what they were wearing and what they looked like, how they got married.
We came to the conclusion that the other old photo from 1910 is of hubby's father's great-uncle. Little is known about him, and no one is sure about his name, but they know there were two brothers who served in the British Army and went to India, then on to Australia. Name of the place where the photo was taken is printed on it, so we googled it :-) It is in Pakistan now, and Wikipedia has told us it used to be a base for British legions since 1850. Fascinating! Having a copy of this photograph I will try and go to archives to find out more)) This whole thing made me think a lot about the importance of family photographs. Simple ones, funny ones, historic ones, photographs of people we love and of people we know - they are all very important!
Some of the photos on that attic are not organised, so I have a project for this year - get family albums, organise the images and write on the back who people in them were, while we still remember...
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