This made me sad to see at a thrift store

Welcome to the wonderful world of thrifting, auctions, estate sales, etc. It's sad.

I get so sick when I see things like that..browse antique stores and there is someone's heritage either lost, tossed aside or forgotten.

I was thrifting this weekend and saw a framed b&w photo of two boys - you know, the 8x10 portraits of preschool aged kids that were a yearly ritual, and usually a prized possession. It made me so sad to see I almost bought it even though I have no idea what I'd do with it. I keep thinking about it and might go back, especially after seeing this thread.

Maybe I'll make a scrapbook of discarded photos.

It saddens me especially when I see vintage wedding photo's framed and think, wow, no one wanted that photo as a keepsake.

Someone put a baby memory book in our church garage sale. 

But, as someone pointed out.......after a generation or so, any personal attachment to the photos is gone.
Just last week, at my mother's home, I saw a rather large photo of some distant relatives.  It is in an oval frame and the photo was probably from the early 1900s.  I don't want the photo.  None of my 8 siblings and assorted other relatives want it.

A few years ago I realized how fleeting our memories will be....the memory of ME as a person = gone by a generation after my death.

I barely knew my grandparents (died young).  When my generation is gone, the real memories are gone.  Unless a person does something very, very important.....their impact on this planet is gone within a generation.    We are not immortal, much as we want to be.......

I don't understand this! Last year my grandma sent me a picture of my great grandma as a little girl with HER mom (my great-great grandma). It is so interesting to see her as a little girl and see her features in my grandma and even my daughter!

I have incredibly mixed feelings about this, on one hand, it's really sad but that other part of me would want to buy them and look through them. It reminds me of the story about Vivian Maier, who is now one of the best known street photographers in the world, her (often undeveloped) photos were sold in a storage locker and bought by several folks who discovered her amazing talents so I just imagine finding some amazing and fun photos, what if those negatives contained vintage Disneyland photos?! I would LOVE to have those! There is a fun mystery there to me.

You don't know the circumstances. I have scanned all of my family's thousands of slides and will be getting rid of the original slides. I don't have a way to look at slides or the space to store that equipment even if I wanted to. The images are preserved, but to be honest, other than those that actually contain images of her grandparents, even the scanned images will hold little value to DD, who most definitely does not want the clutter of slides that she can't even identify.

The memories are preserved and there if she or I want to look at them, but there's no need to keep the physical slides.

I am still holding out hope that DS will someday care about his ancestors and for that matter, documentation of his own childhood. He has never been one to care much about things like that. He doesn't have kids and says he doesn't want to have kids so unless he changes his mind, I don't know if he will ever care. I have a few nice scrapbooks that documented the years from birth through high school graduation. I hope that he will want them but he might not.

As for storage units, I realize that many cannot pay the fee, have fallen on hard times, just don't care, etc. but sometimes the storage unit owner is just irresponsible. My dad was one of those. He worked. He had the money to pay his monthly fee. He didn't pay it for over 5 years. I can't believe they never emptied his unit. The back rent was eventually paid (not going into detail about those specifics) and when he cleared the unit, there was a rug missing. It was a rug that was worth a lot of money. To this day, he will still bring that rug up and talk about who he is absolutely certain stole it (in reality, he has no way of knowing). It is all I can do to bite my tongue and tell him he is damn lucky he got ANYTHING from that unit considering he didn't pay the rent on it for over 5 years.

I LOVE all of the ancestors photos that I have copies of that I have gotten from my mom. She has the originals. I suspect that someday all of that will come to me because she knows that I am the one that cares about it.

It kills me. Being both a scrapbooker and a genealogy & local history buff, I know that if you look, you can find someone who would want those photos. And it's typically easiest for someone who knows the deceased to find a new owner for them. But many people don't care and therefore don't want to take the time, and that's their right, of course, but it still really bums me out.

I've had an envelope of photos in my possession for 10 years now that I marked "People I Don't Know". Some were not labelled, but many were, but I just didn't know what those people meant to me or my family.

Just this week I found someone who is related to a bunch of those people! It's been great for both of us. She's been able to tell me their links to my family (Friend, neighbor, etc.) and she's getting photos she has never seen before of her relatives.

I also find that posting them on area Facebook groups such as "You Know You're From......" type groups can help determine who they are. that works best with group photos. And people tend to love scenery shots of the area as well.

I have a cousin who fell on very hard times. She lost her home and had to put all of her stuff in storage. She could not pay the storage rent--so she lost all of that, too. Included were all of the family photos from her childhood and even before. (I had no idea this happened – I live out of state.)

I feel so bad for her. I've been going through all of my photos (my dad was a prolific photographer) and gathering as many of her family as I can find. I used to watch storage wars – but now I can't, because I can't help thinking of the people who actually owned that stuff at one time. Too sad for me.

I don't care if no one wants the actual scrapbooks.  But I hope someone will at least want some of the photos.   I will do my best to keep identifying people who might want them or who might be willing to remove a sampling to preserve fro future generations.    Right now I have a small list of people's names jotted down, with contact info, that DH can offer my heritage photos and family history stuff to. 

After my FIL passed away we started going through boxes of slides. There were tons of pictures of fish and deer. We kept the ones with people in the picture. We got rid of the ones that were taken through the car window of a deer there (can you see it? I don't) behind that tree... Or a picture of a pile of fish, don't know who caught them, etc. But even so they were all mixed up so you never knew what year they were or which kid that was.
So we have gone through most of them *I hope* but now have to try to put them in some sort of order. It doesn't help that my SIL could spend forever looking at a picture trying to identify whose foot that is or the back of someone's head!