This is Nannie, my mother's mother, or Charlene Spies.
A few years ago, her husband, my mom's dad, Melbert, "Speedy" or PawPaw, passed away.
This is PawPaw.
Nannie has been working very hard on cleaning out a lot of unpacked belongings from their house. She has been going through packed away wedding gifts, years and year of photos, clothes, toys, you name it...
While cleaning, she came across this small box full of (very red and very dusty and scratched) slides from her wedding from the early 1950's in Weimar, Texas. She asked me if I could "make them into prints" and that if I could do that for her, I wouldn't need to get anything else for her for Christmas. I knew it would be a challenge and rather time consuming, but I knew that she deserved to have her prints and I wanted nothing other than to do that for her. I am so glad that I was able to (do my best) to transform these unusable slides of hers into an album of images she could share and display.
I'm not normally one to be extremely interested in family history. I mean, I love and respect my family and ancestors, but it just wasn't something I've been curious about. As I spent hours and hours restoring some of these images, I couldn't help but think about the people in the photographs that I didn't know. What relationship did they have with my grandparents? Where are they now? What are they doing? Are they happy? Are they alive? Who took these images? How much did wedding photographers pay in the 1950's in small town Texas?
I've always been much more interested in the sometimes too personal stories of individuals rather than just documenting the usual names, birthdays, relations, locations, etc of a traditional family tree. I started to dream of creating a web based interactive family tree using some of these images people in them may not otherwise ever see...
We will see if that whole family tree website idea ever comes into fruition.
I am definitely the go-to for anything photo related in my family. I gladly help them all out. My parents paid for my college education and bought my film scanner, so I never mind being able to repay them all as much as I can by doing these small things for them. I can't even begin to explain how much happiness it brought me to be able to give Nannie her album and to know that it brought her so much happiness as well. She told me that it was her favorite Christmas present. I think it was one of my all time favorites to give as well.
I know I'm making a post about Christmas gifts on the first evening of spring break in March... but hey I'm a high school teacher so lay off me, man...
