Family Memories

Hmm, a rare surprise in the mail today. My Aunt sent me some family photo's, mostly of when my Father was younger and a couple of when I was little. My Mother also gave me a few more photo albums, ones that belonged to my Dad.


Spent some time tonight looking through them, basically covering 1946 through 1963 with a couple gaps in between. One thing that really stuck out, a picture of my Dad about 4 years old sitting on their front step with my Aunt. He had his leg crossed in just the same way that I usually have mine crossed lol. Guess it goes back further then I thought >_>


As fate would have it, I know a lot more about my Mothers side of the family then my Fathers... But his albums are also a bit neater, well annotated, I think someday it would be nice to go through them with my Aunt and see what she can remember of some of their vacations and stuff. One thing that I found out when looking through the photos; that I never knew before, my Dad was in the boy scouts when he was a kid.


I was also looking through a book from when he was doing the recruit training/etc in 1963, of course I looked through the company photographs to find him (y). Some of the pictures my Aunt sent me were of him in his summer whites, most of the ones we have are in the winter blues. I think the USN is dealing away with those now're days, oh well :\. In side the pages I also found a greyhound envelope with bus tickets from the time and a few photo's of aircraft.


I know he hated the Navy more or less, he was supposed to be stationed in Texas close to home but wound up in Florida -- someone out of state got Fort Hood, and then later shipped off to Midway when life was going a bit better. Talk about getting the short end of the stick lol. But then again, if it wasn't for that I probably would never have been born ~20 years later ^_^


I'm a somewhat sentimental kinda guy, not exactly a big person on photo albums but it's good to be reminded every now and then of where you come from. It's sort of like looking at a small picture into another time, another place. Some of the older photo's are quite faded but I guess 60 years or so will do that to a photograph. But all in all most of them were in pretty good shape, quite a pleasant stroll you could say.

One thing that was a bit odd, one of the Christmas photos showed my Dad getting a tub of "American Plastic Bricks", they look like a cross between something simpler I used to play with as a boy when I was a few years younger and the LEGO bricks so ubiquitous with much of my generation. I also sighed at the sight of my Dad and Aunt sitting around the tree with a new record player -- someone was telling me the other day that they were looking for an MP3 Player >_>.


I was born in '89 and my memory goes about as far back as 1990~1991 and I don't think I've really seen a record player in years. Heh, now this makes me feel old myself... When I was a lad we had Walkman and similar products with your choice of ear buds or or supra-aural headphones -- now they are selling WIRELESS HEADPHONES !!! Not to mention that Compact Disks (CDs) and now more modern iPods and flash based devices are becoming common... The Compact Cassettes of my day are probably long dead and buried by now.

I wonder what my Dad would think of this new fan dangled technology, personally I think I would stick with the record player if it wasn't for computers.


One of these days I really would like to get everything scanned, organized, and tagged on the computer. Because unlike a photograph, a file doesn't fade out so easy. If I ever have kids, I know I would like to be able to show them about their ancestors. My ~/Pictures folder is only ~255mb so adding about a dozen photo albums can't hurt that much, can it?