Monday, April 27, 2009

RAOGK - Find the family of orphaned pictures

Genea-Musings reader Brian Miller sent a link to a blog post titled Blah Blah Blah from the Watching the Grass Grow blog about performing a Random Act of Genealogical Kindness. A truly random act.

The writer found some framed photographs at an indoor flea market, noticed that they had names and dates on them, did some research and eventually found a living relative of the photo subjects, and bought them and shipped them off to the relative, who was ecstatic to receive them. Read the entire post for all of the details.

For me, this is only one part of the story. The best part, I think, is the reaction of the store employees, one of whom said “You gave me goosebumps! That is the most amazing thing I have ever heard! To be able to reunite these portraits with their great-grand child is amazing!”

Many of us get goosebumps when we hear stories like this. I do, and I appreciate Brian sharing the link with me.

One of my biggest regrets is that, when my parents held the garage sale at my grandparents house in 1977, I didn't buy or obtain the boxes of picture postcards that they sold for pennies to the picture. I know that there were many vintage photos of San Diego from the 1880 to 1920 time frame, and many postcards from correspondents with letters and notes on the back of them. When I started myDresearch in 1988, I thought about visiting San Diego thrift stores to see if I could find the remainders, but I soon was overwhelmed with the genealogy data and tasks and never got around to it.

I do have boxes and boxes of family pictures, which includes some San Diego vintage postcard photographs, but I know that there were many more. Frankly, I haven't finished scanning everything I have from the boxes of stuff. I did one bag yesterday during Scanfest - about 55 photographs. Now I need to crop, rotate, label them, and put them in appropriate file folders.

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