Just can't get enough

Normally I don't start writing a blog post at half-past bedtime, but this one couldn't wait. When I scanned my grandmother's red and brown photo albums a few years ago, my computer had a (by modern standards) pretty small hard drive, so hi-res scans weren't very practical at the time. I scanned the pages, digitally pulled out the photos from each page, and then scrapped the too-big scans of the full pages. Nowadays, with storage capacity much cheaper than even a few years ago, I have a couple of external hard drives, each with several hundred gigabytes free for me to fill up with genealogy-related goodness.

Upon discovering the blue photo album, I asked if I could scan it, as well as rescan the red and brown albums (the beige one was done just recently, so I have good quality scans of the full pages for that one). Grandma was nice enough to say yes, so the last few days I have been steadily working my way through these albums again. I guess it's been a while since I've looked at a lot of these pictures, because a lot of them don't look familiar at all. Some of them I know very well, and it's been fun to see them back in context.

However, I made an interesting discovery while redoing the red book. I don't know if I saw this last time or not, but a lot of the pictures in one section of the book are only taped down on one side. When you flip the picture over - there's writing! Some of them have a short description of what was photographed, but some of them have little stories or funny comments about the photo or people in it.

Here's one example. The picture above is my great-grandfather, Charles Wagner, aka Pop. He looks like he's taking a nap in a chair by a pool. This was one of a series of photos taken at a hotel called the Hacienda, I think near Las Vegas. On the back of the photo was written (spelling and punctuation in original):

At the Hacienda pool pop said, I'll pretend I'm taking a sun bath, just as he layed down & I was about to snap his picture, the sun went behind a cloud, the wind came up, & it was cold. You can see by the ripply water in the pool, how the wind was blowing

That just really stood out to me. It just felt like I was there, in a little scene with my great-grandparents just trying to take a silly picture, and mother nature not cooperating. Once again, my great-grandmother has given me something so amazing in these photos. I'm glad I got a chance to give this album a second look.