Old tech meets high tech

I have boxes and boxes (ok, small boxes) of photographs and negatives that came from my mom's parents' house. Many of the photos are from North Dakota, where my grandparents were both raised on farms before moving to Portland to raise my mom and her sisters in the house my grandfather built (below).

Now that we have a good scanner that also scans negatives, I'm slowly working my way through digitizing them 1) to preserve the images and 2) to find out what the heck is on all those negatives. (a light box might help too, but we don't have one of those.) So far, it's a relatively easy, but slow process. The pictures look pretty good on the computer, though, and I'm pretty happy to have them collected in one place. I have seen some neat projects that involve printing the pictures on fabric or iron-on transfers and then sewing them into things. My mom went through them with me and tried to do her best to identify the subjects, but some of them we don't have a clue about. Here are a few highlights. The quality has deteriorated, but you can click on them to make them bigger and easier to see.

































I particularly like these ones- I'm sure there is some technical name for the format, but they just look neat to me. The one on top is my grandfather, I would guess in his 20s, so late 1930s maybe. We think the bottom one has my grandmother on the right side of it, on the horse back in North Dakota.

The picture at the beginning has my great grandparents in it, Aquilinius and Clementina (or is it Clementine?). I'm pretty sure they're the two on the far right and far left. They were both born in Ukraine, where their families had moved from Germany. If the internet geneology people are right, they were married in Richardton, North Dakota in 1906.