fautrever.com

As you may have noticed things have been a bit quiet around fautrever.com lately. We’re still here, happy and healthy but our day-to-day life has certainly changed. As you may recall we purchased a house last May. It was a big decision but it felt like the right one for us. We had long dreamed of a chunk of land with room for a garden and even goats and chickens (someday) and finally all the pieces fell into place. Owning the property requires that we stay put for a good part of the year, and after traveling year-round (mostly) for the past four years we are comfortable with the change. We are looking forward to this next leg of our life journey.

Our lives are still filled with adventures, just not so many of the traveling kind. (It might be time for us to rethink the title of our blog.) One of the many hobbies we fill our time with when we’re not tackling house projects, volunteering, or working is creating photographic archives for our families. It was my brainchild and it grew out of our need to downsize so that we could squeeze into our very first RV. As you might have noticed, I love to take pictures, I always have. I feel they capture moments and places that I might otherwise forget. As a result I had close to twenty large photo albums, which of course could not fit into a twenty-two foot long home on wheels with two adults and two cats.

Yet the thought of leaving them behind was unbearable so I had this brilliant idea to digitize all my photos. Seriously. All I would have to do is carefully remove each photo from the album, scan it, label it, and sort it into the corresponding year. Piece of cake, right? I don’t remember how fast it went or how much time it took but I must have thought it quite simple since I also started a digital album for Lance, too. Of course if you know me then you know that it didn’t make sense to limit the albums to just photos we owned. Why not include childhood pictures from other family members? And why stop with just our siblings? Why not gather photos from parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and yes, even grandparents? There is nothing simple in my world because apparently, I like it that way.

As I think about the projects now I’m so glad they unfolded as they did. I discovered photos of myself as a child at events that I have no recollection of—yet there I was, and now I have proof. Along the way I also unearthed pictorial evidence of defining moments in the lives of family members that have altered my understanding of these people. It has been a time consuming yet edifying experience. In the case of the oldest photos—some of them tintypes from the mid-1800s—I have become acquainted with my ancestors. Many of whom I would have never met if my 93 year-old Grandmother hadn’t introduced us.

I shudder to think of all that would have been lost if I hadn’t embarked on this photographic journey. A friend of mine recently provided me with the perfect term for this: “endangered memories.” Just like threatened and endangered species around the world if someone (anyone) doesn’t stop to take the time to preserve and protect these memories, within a generation or two they could be gone forever. Now our photos are labeled and dated and in some cases small anecdotes have been included—the memories of these people have been preserved for future generations.

I am the self-proclaimed curator for two family archives, mine and Lance’s. At the end of last year we finalized a version for Lance’s family and gave each of his immediate family members their own copy of the archive on a portable hard drive. That archive has close to 5,000 photos. My family’s archive still needs some work and at last count it had close to 7,000 photos. As you can imagine along the way I stumbled upon some really interesting old photos. Some captured moments of historical relevance and I thought I’d share a few of them.

Yellowstone National Park, 1965.

I’ll start you off with a snapshot from a Yellowstone National Park vacation that family members took during the summer of 1965. In this classic scene a bear is standing up against a car, perhaps after receiving a handout. Instead of being frightened the people within the car seem to be enjoying the interaction. I imagine that their amusement would last until the bear broke the window and injured someone. Things were so different back then—people treated our parks like they were drive-through petting zoos.

A few days later the family toured Glacier National Park. It isn’t that these photos have much historical significance but they have special meaning for me. I worked at Glacier one summer during college and it is still my favorite National Park. What really caught my eye was the picture of Wild Goose Island—without knowing it I snapped an identical photo from that exact same spot thirty-three years later. Apparently, I come by my love of Glacier naturally.

Glacier National Park, 1965.

Moving back in time are snapshots from the prior year’s family vacation. The family went on a road trip to Washington D.C. in August of 1964, and hit the usual sights around our nation’s capitol including a visit to Arlington National Cemetery. When I first began scanning these pictures I wasn’t looking too closely at them—after all I’ve been to D.C. and Arlington twice now. Then I noticed the long lines of people and the date. Then it hit me. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been assassinated a mere ten months prior. The nation was still in shock and thousands of people were still making their way to his graveside to pay their respects. Granted I’ve learned quite a bit about the event from books and documentaries through the years but to participate through the viewfinder of one of my family member’s cameras was an entirely different matter.

Arlington National Cemetery, 1964.

The final photo, after much deliberation, we have decided to not post publicly due to its sensitive nature. It fell out of a small stack of photos that once belonged to my grandfather. They were all taken during the years that he served in the U.S. military during World War II. It is unclear who snapped the pictures or when or where they were taken. I was able to deduce that at least one of them was taken in 1943. The snapshots show my grandfather with his buddies or in uniform in various locations in Europe, but one had an entirely different subject matter.

The event captured in the photo was so foreign to me that it took me a moment to decipher. When my brain finally comprehended the image—it chilled me to the bone. It is amazing how much an effect a two-by-three-inch black and white piece of paper can have. Three unknown men were standing in a large, deep hole. Resting, with shovels in hand. Closer inspection revealed that it was not rocks, sticks and debris they were unearthing—they were surrounded by twisted and tangled human bodies. The photo bears no information—nothing to answer the questions of where or when or why (as if there is ever an appropriate answer to that question). No angry scrawl on the back denouncing the perpetrators. No sorrowful inscription expressing inconsolable grief. Nothing—as if there were too many emotions to even try to understand.

Though I was fortunate to meet my grandfather, and I carry with me one vivid memory of him, I was quite young when he died. So, I have no way of knowing but I believe he carefully tucked these pictures away without ever looking at them again. He certainly would not have needed any reminder of what he witnessed—he carried the awful magnitude of it around with him in his heart. Though he probably never re-examined them it appears that he felt it important to keep the photos safe. As if to preserve a vitally important moment in time. Something that I wholeheartedly agree with.

Photos: View the photographs from Moments in Time.