Recently I ran across this quote that sticks with me when I think about my family history. It is taken from a column in The Guardian, written by Sundus Abdi, who recently adopted an analog camera in place of a smartphone. Concerning family photo albums, he wrote:

“I spent hours poring over those albums, fascinated by the posed and proud faces of relatives I had never met. In those photographs, I saw resilience and connection. I realized that every image was a piece of something larger: a history that had been passed down, a story of survival, of migration, of home. Those images weren’t just photographs; They were keepsakes of a life lived.”

My interest in family history goes back to the leather-covered photo album my Mom kept with photos from her life in Paris when she was young. Since then I’ve inherited much more, including my Grandmother’s scrapbooks, and old family photos found in other albums that my Dad re-copied, as Mom began to take an interest in genealogy. She uncovered a great deal of information about her own ancestors and then began researching Dad’s family as well. But it is the photographs that I keep coming back to. These people really lived in other times and places, and it seems important to me to have a link to the past, when today the world seems to be moving so quickly into an uncertain future.

To anyone who comes upon these pages, the names and dates may not matter so much, nor who is related to who, etc. But I hope you will enjoy the faces in the photos and the connections we share.

More about my family history can be found on these pages:

• Reflections on genealogy
• My mother’s family (coming next!)
• My father’s family