Family Moments

Early spring for my family is filled with birthdays, including mine. This year, the eldest sibling in our family reached 70 years of age. Who would have thought that day would come! Seems we were all just in our twenties, let loose on the world to make a difference.

My brother turned 70 and we gathered the extended family at a restaurant to celebrate. Mid-way, my sister suggested, and my niece’s husband took, a group portrait of all us old ones (I was going to use another word…) and that resulting image has now been shared with everyone through multiple printed copies. (Not shared here for privacy reasons.)

I realized as I printed the photos that we don’t have many family moments like these in pictures. A sad reality of growing up in a household where food and clothing were the priorities and a camera was a luxury we could not afford. But you don’t get a second chance at these. So I have a few thoughts on this subject.

Don’t get me wrong, we do have some family photographs. Mostly of Christmas or major events. And school photos too, like this one of me. And as the digital age dawned, the youngest family members at least started to memorialize more mundane events, like family barbeques. So like many modern western families, there is a growing collection of images documenting our lives. But these images are mostly the lives of the youngest ones – the babies born to us older folk and how they grew and today continue to spread their wings. But because we never had them as youngsters, there are not so many photos of us older ones even today.

Because we did not grow up with a camera in the house, it just never occurs to us (me) to interrupt family moments today to take a photo of the matriarchs and patriarchs of the family. It is so commonplace among young people to grab a selfie or a group shot of friends out for the night that it would be weird not to. And even though photography is my main activity now, it just never occurs to me to memorialize mine or my siblings activities. To me, that would be weird.

As I looked at this rare photo of us four siblings, I wondered what our distant relatives would think 50 years from now, if the photo survives that long. I have just a few photos of my parents in their youth (like this one of my dad, more than 70 years ago) and I wondered what their life was like around the time of the Second World War. But more specifically, there were other people in the photos that I did not know and have no way of identifying now. I wonder who they are and what connection they had to my parents. Will the same happen with us? Probably.

Lots of families have home movies, carousels of slides of trips taken and even audio recordings of the kids first words or songs. Most of these are stuffed in drawers or in boxes in the basement, waiting to be discovered when a house is decluttered or downsized. When I worked at the camera store, many customers would come in with these treasures, found when a family member took ill or had passed. They were hoping to revitalize them by digitizing them. Often they commented that they knew or knew of the people in these records. In most cases, they had a lot more of these memories than my family has.

So I guess my message is a simple one. It may not be what you normally do or what you think of, but having a record of the members of your family is important, especially as they age. I envy those who even without any visual record can recount multiple generations of their ancestors and what they did. Someday, someone will ask. It would be nice to have an answer.