Family Albums

I am blessed, at least on my mother's side, to come from a family which cherishes family photos and the stories that they tell. As a young girl, I remember visiting my great-grandmother in northern Wisconsin. We'd spend hours and hours squished together on the couch flipping through stacks and stacks of albums, and shuffling through boxes full of snapshots dating so far back, they may have been taken with one of the first cameras invented. The real blessing though was the stories. My great-grandma Alice was a wealth of information about our family history. I was fascinated with her ability to recall the smallest details about our family from several generations back. One time, during our visit to Wisconsin, we visited a local museum, and my Grandma Alice could identify just about every single individual in every single photograph that hung on the walls. And provide a witty anecdote to go along with it. For my contribution to the blog today, since you are something of a captive audience, I would like to share with you a little piece of my history in the form of some old family photos.

First off, a couple of photos from my Grandpa Gordy's time spent serving in WWII. Sadly, he passed away before I was old enough to ask him to tell me the stories that went along with these photographs.

This one I think is pretty self-explanatory. Gordy in Aachen.

This one came with a caption: Cologne, August 1945

This next photograph is looking down a wooden ski jump in Iron Mountain, MI. (Which is in the upper peninsula of MI.) I remember climbing on this a couple times in my childhood on our visits to Wisconsin/Michigan.


I love this next photo of my Grandpa Gordy & Grandma Dolores' cottage in Rhode Island after a hurricane in 1976. The softness and glow of the photograph are just so mystical to me. I made several trips to this cottage in my childhood, and I always remember it being this magical and dream-like. The sounds and smells and sight of the quaint little beach cottages....



And finally, this photo made me smile, having just celebrated my own wedding this summer. I love admiring the style of bridesmaids attire from my aunt's wedding in 1969. (That's my mom in the blue.) I wonder what my nieces will think of the dresses I chose for my own bridesmaids when they look at my wedding photos 40 years from now.


Leave a comment and tell me about one of your favorite family photos.