Mom's albums

(These 3,279 photos are now available here.  Much better presentation and features, such as downloading the whole album.)

My mom, Barbara Jean Swanson Severs, 1923-1985, kept these photo albums from 1949-1985, from the time of her wedding until her death.  When I'm doing family history, I'm often happy to find one data point for an individual.  A document, a letter, a photo.  We can't record it all.  But like many families, our family photo albums provide a glut of photographic information about our lives:  vacations, proms, first cars, dance recitals, birthdays.  In this case, I was unable to pick and choose without destroying the narrative. Together, these albums tell the story of our family.  Not the whole story, naturally, just many silent glimpses of the things our mom wanted us to remember.  The good things, and there were a lot of them.  Most of the events recorded here are found nowhere else.  My siblings and I all remember many of the details, but none of us remembers them all. 

It took me forever to get started scanning because I had it in my mind that I would scan each photo separately.  The pics are double-stick taped to each page so I didn't want to remove them.  Scanning each photo by cropping during scanning would take too long. Scanning from the negatives would take too long, too.  Finally I realized I could scan whole pages rather than individual photos.  Since Mom annotated the photos extensively, this approach captures all her comments and the feel of the way she put them together.  It also speeds things up enormously.  I've had these albums for the last 10 years and I've always wanted to find a way to make them available to anyone who's interested.  Pictures are just information and there's no reason they should be in just one place.  One of the best things about the digital age is that information is sharable and it doesn't matter where things are.  Geography is history, as they say.  Photos are also vastly easier to view and manipulate in this form. 

There are 56 albums.  The first 6 cover 1949-1969 and contain about 100 pages each.  Then, in 1970, she got a new Konica SLR and the pace quickened to about an album every 4-6 months.  The next 50 albums contain about 50 pages each and cover the years 1970-1985.  Mom numbered only the front of each page, so I've numbered the front 1.0 and the back 1.5.