5 Photos: Decades of life revealed after death

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In October 2010 the wife and I headed to upstate New York for the regrettable task of combing through her parents’ home after her mother passed away and before the house was sold. Like so many generations before us, it was our job to comb through the accreted objects of two lifetimes and find anything we wanted to preserve.

Here are 5 photos from our exploration, revealing tiny pieces of the 20th century shining through a family’s life in America at its height.

My wife’s father was something of a photo buff, with a variety of cameras, including some fascinating early Polaroid models.
The View-Master was a staple of mid-20th-century kids toy boxes, with swappable disks that held tiny positive film frames arranged to provide a stereoscopic view of various still-image stories. Fairy tales, cartoons, and more were the subjects. This particular model was one of the first.
My wife’s father was a soldier in World War II and had this German first aid kit filled with war memorabilia he’d collected. That included things like formal medals from the United States—including a Purple Heart—but also some Nazi gear, taken from… well… we don’t know. He refused to talk about his experiences in the war (which… yeah… that’s fair).
The obsession with cameras meant there was a huge collection of 8mm films captured though the 1960s and 1970s. He filmed typical stuff—family gatherings, vacations, and other events. In the years since we converted all the reels into video.
And here’s the camera that captured all those family memories on silent 8mm film. The camera required manually cranking the geared mechanism on the side, which apparently would apply tension to a spring inside, which would then release the tension as mechanical energy at a set rate ideal for pulling film through and releasing the camera shutter.

What’s remarkable to me, looking back now, is thinking about how future generations will acquire our massive digital libraries, but the source objects that shot our videos and photos will be largely lost.

And so it goes.

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