Looking at the past

 My cousin Mary Lou is moving out of the house she's lived in almost all her life.

Oh, for a lot of years, she and her husband were raising their five children in another part of town, but when my aunt and uncle passed, they moved into the stately white Colonial with the fantastically beautiful side and back yard.

Age has made it difficult to maintain the big house with its flights of stairs. So, like so many of us, they decided to move to a more convenient home.

In the process of packing, Mary Lou found two photo albums in the attic, both having belonged to my mother. I didn't ask how they got into her house; I was just grateful to have them. 

Obviously, my mother had included in that album photos once belonging to her parents and their friends. Very old pictures of people from the "old country," Italy, professionally taken and formatted like postcards, to be sent to the family in the U.S. Some had inscriptions on the back, even names in a few cases, but most were just photos. After all, the family knew who they were...no need to label them for anyone else.

Except now there isn't anyone left to tell us who those people might be. How did they fit into the family? Did they have ancestors here in the States who might want to see or even own those photos?

I've been mildly obsessing over the pictures since I brought the albums home, sat at my dining room table with an Xacto knife and carefully removed them from the crumbling black pages on which they were fastened with those little black sticky corners that left scars when they were removed.

Hours have been spent fussing with the pictures. I've scanned them into my computer, looked up some of the family history I've shared with cousins and come up with a fair idea of who the folks were. I've already sent some of the originals to one cousin in California so she can show her grandchildren their great-grandmother as an infant, a little girl, a sober-eyed secretary in her working suit standing in front of her car.

Now I'm trying to locate relatives of some of the others, those unsmiling, serious people in the photos from Italy, the men, women and children in group photos, some of whom I recognize, most of whom I don't. 

With surgery coming up in a week, I've found this to be a distracting pastime. I hope to be able to keep at it as I recover, searching the internet for information about a lost relative to whom to send photos they surely don't even know exist.

Lesson here: go through all the photos I have in envelopes, boxes and albums. Make sure they are carefully labeled. Save someone the task of investigating to find their real homes. Do the family a favor while my memory is still fresh.