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For those not familiar with the song and the stories behind it, here's a link: youtube.com/watch?v=1y2… Sing along with Pete Seeger and the audience.
We just finished going through a treasure trove of pictures that had been boxed up after my mother died. There's one of a handsome young man in uniform. I remember being told as a child that…
For those not familiar with the song and the stories behind it, here's a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1y2SIIeqy34 Sing along with Pete Seeger and the audience.
We just finished going through a treasure trove of pictures that had been boxed up after my mother died. There's one of a handsome young man in uniform. I remember being told as a child that he was a cousin, but I don't remember his name. And there is no one left from that generation to tell me. So when you have questions about your family history, ask, before it's too late.
Thank you for posting Pete's video, Betsy. And for your poignant reminder to treasure our family histories.
Indeed, ask - and write it down in a safe place that won't get lost in the shuffles of many moves. 🙏
Betsy, I would issue a plea to preserve every old photograph you have. Our technology will continue to advance in the ability to recognize faces of people in old pictures. I'm not an expert, but I predict that eventually machine learning will be able to correlate disparate scraps of information, enabling identification of the people in a picture of our great grandparents' yard party in 1900, or whatever. I've been working on genealogy for several years, and I have pictures of people that my Mom saved, like you, but I don't have a clue who they were. The Internet gives us the ability to connect the dots, around the world, in a way that was not possible until this current era. That process, and ability, is surely nascent now, and will continue to develop (assuming civilization does not collapse in November). It will probably take the form of centralized collection points, where pictures and letters can be voluntarily uploaded to a "cloud-based" database, along with whatever information and clues we can supply. I've been a science fiction fan since the 1950s, so maybe I'm just dreaming. But I'm confident it is possible that old picture identification will help in our research as genealogists.
Thank you for this encouragement. There has been a fair amount of genealogy work on my mother's side of the family, but none that I know of on my father's, and I think that the picture that I referred to is on his side, since nobody has been able to identify it. But, like my mother, I'm a packrat, so this photo, along with a bunch of others, is in a box for now.
I think patience is essential in genealogy work. I have a mystery in my mother's direct line, five generations back. My wife and I have been talking about going on a road trip to Upstate New York and Vermont, to explore several cemeteries in both states, and research materials in Rutland, VT. I'll need to get back into the research before we go, hoping thereby to not miss the little hunches that occur after being into it with single-minded focus for hours or days on end. Vermont has digitized a lot of their records, but so far I have been unable to find my great-great-great-great-x-grandmother.