I can still remember the cold snowy winter Sunday when Mom took out the cigar boxes full pictures. I was 8. My sister and I couldn’t wait for her to flip open the lid of the box to reveal its surprises. One by one she took out a snapshot. She gazed at each one then showed them to us. She then told us who was in each candid and sometimes why the picture was taken.
Those images stick in my mind today.
They weren’t great pictures of ladies in grand clothing; instead there were pics of the grandparents I never knew.
My aunts in oversize hats from the early 1960s.
Cousins clowning at my fifth birthday party.
The pieces of history in that box told my family story in pictorial snippets.
The Power of a Picture
Those snapshots made me realize at a young age that I’m a visual learner. I think in pictures. Your pictures. My pictures. Never met a picture I didn’t like. I love them all.
I believe that each one is a story worth telling. The information contained in photos is exciting. What they represent can help someone remember their past. For some looking at a photo is life changing. A picture can reveal where they come from and whom they look like. For others it’s the collection of images that fit together to tell the tale of their family’s past.
In every family collection there are certain truths. Each picture is different. Each person’s reaction to an image is different. If you show the same picture to several members of your family each one will tell you different details. Not everyone remembers events the same way.
Pictures are Story Triggers
Those photos in the cigar boxes are now mine to take care of. One afternoon I took out those boxes and I placed a tape recorder in front of my mother. The first picture I took out of the box was this one.
She’s the little girl in the white socks and beret crouched down in front. Flanked by her brothers with her parents in the back right. Center and to the back right is her oldest sister leaning her arm on her future husband.
“Oh that’s me in the center. My sister Lauretta (to the back and left) and her future husband in the (center in the fedora) loved to dress me up and take me to the movies.”
“We saw everything. There wasn’t a Shirley Temple movie they didn’t take me to.”
When asked how old she was in that photo she said 5. That one picture was a door into her life at that time. She talked about a lot more of her life than just that moment.
Her relationship with her older sister: “Because she was so much older she was like a second mother to me”
Recollections of the first day of school: “I didn’t like it so I walked home. My mother took me back saying I’d just have to get used to it.”
And her parents: “There was a family gathering at our house every Saturday night with music. My mother played the piano and she and my father sang.”
The power of that one picture let me experience bits of my Mom’s life.
Experience Picture Power at Your House
Try this exercise with one of your relatives and a family photo. Put it in the center of a table on a big sheet of paper. Next to it write down broad details about the who, what, when, where and why of it.
Think about what you remember about the day.
Who wore what and why?
What was the weather like?
How did you feel about the other people in the picture?
What memories come flooding back that aren’t related to the
picture?
picture?
Now put all the details together and tell me what you discovered.