I’ve recently turned my attention to a long-avoided task: digitising the family photos. No, not the heirloom portraits or 1950s black-and-white snaps; I’m talking about my own photographs dating back to the arrival of my firstborn. Family history is as much about creating a legacy as it is about revealing the past.
My collection embraces most of the 1990s and early-2000s (ceasing abruptly when ‘iPhone’ became a thing). The prints are scattered across many albums, hoarded in the original developer envelopes and even appended to old school projects.
Having brought them all together and grouped them according to codes on the reverse side of the prints (in many cases referring back to the original negatives for guidance) I was ready to start scanning.
Disciplined labelling of digital image files is critically important if you’re hoping to achieve a meaningful chronology. A widely recommended naming convention adopts the YYYYMMDD format requiring at least an elementary timeline that belies a scratchy memory.
So, to help me answer the “when the heck was that taken?” question, I turned to a dusty box of decades-old bank statements that should have been thrown out years ago. Reviewing ATM activity and credit card transactions can effectively pinpoint exactly when you were at a place and therefore affixes a date – right down to the month – to a strip of negatives.
In this small way the much-maligned box of old bank records has helped tell my family story. Perhaps in a hundred years my descendants will delight in learning exactly when I visited Ireland or refuelled at Coonabarabran. That’s why my next project is to scan the actual bank statements just before (finally) consigning them to the trash.
What a great idea! I would never have thought of checking against old bank statements. Thanks for the tip 🙂