Photos of my Grandfather



Grandfather posing with grandchildrenEarlier this week, my uncle sent me a very interesting email through Facebook. He said that he has been connecting with some long lost family members, (whom I never new existed). One of these newly found family members put some really old family photos onto his Facebook page. My uncle said that some of the photos were of his father, who was my grandfather.

I’d never met my grandfather when he was alive. He died before I was born. While I know that my mother has a drawer full of old, black and white, family photos, I was never allowed to look through them when I was a child. She may have been concerned that I would damage the photos, since I was, after all, a child. I guess this is a reasonable reaction. I cannot quite remember if she ever showed me a photo of her father, my grandfather. So, for me, looking at these old family photos on Facebook was like meeting my grandfather for the first time.

It is amazing how much you can learn about a person when you look at old photos. I learned that my grandfather had a really nice smile. He looked as though he was a genuinely happy person. He wasn’t exceptionally tall, but I wouldn’t describe him as short, either.

I learned that my grandfather was starting to lose his hair. In these photos, his hairline was receding, but not in the typical way one would expect. Instead of having his hair disappear from a round spot on the back of his head, or having his entire hairline slowly move backwards, he was losing his hair in two places. To the right and to the left of the center of his hairline, there was hair missing. I found this fascinating to see, because one of my brother’s is losing his hair in the same unique pattern.

I also learned that whoever labeled these photos may have made a mistake. The man who my uncle has identified as my grandfather has been identified as someone else in many of these photos. Clearly, more genealogy research will need to be done.

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