My Uncle Tommy, my father’s much younger half brother, died in April. A few weeks after he died, Leah and I started meeting his wife, Micki, for our regular Wednesday lunch of huevos rancheros. A couple of cousins are now joining us, so it’s a nice get together for the two of us.
Micki has been clearing out a basement full of Tommy’s huge collection of stuff. Occasionally she finds something that she doesn’t want or doesn’t know what to do with. One of those things was a laundry basket full of photo albums. The photos are almost all of my immediate family, plus several albums of photos my father shot while in Europe during World War II. Micki gave them to me Wednesday after our lunch.
The labels read “France – Germany, September 1944, May 1945” and “Belgium Germany, France England, May 1945 December 1945”.
The most amazing thing about the photos — or at least one of the most amazing — is that I have never seen the vast majority of them. In fact, I had no idea most of them even existed. I am almost certain my brother never got the chance to see them either. Leah and I looked at some of the albums, and I am entirely blown away by the photos. There are photos of my father as a young man, my mother as a kid, my brother and me as babies, family members I didn’t know, and baby photos of my nephews. There are photos of the kindergarten “graduation” my brother attended in 1952 and that I attended in 1955. There is my first-grade class photo. There is a photo of my father’s father, a man whose image was completely unknown to me until recently.
I can hardly wait to go through them in more detail and pick out some to scan.
I have no idea why my uncle had these albums at his house. The most likely explanation is that at some point my parents gave them to my father’s mother to look at, and they somehow ended up at her house when she died. A few years later her husband, Uncle Tommy’s father died. I suspect that Tommy cleared out the house when the estate was settled and took them home, maybe thinking he would give them to my father later. Based on their condition and the way they smell, I suspect that he put them in his basement and forgot about them.
You can be sure I will share some of them here.
What an amazing treasure trove of photos. I am so looking forward to seeing them. How thoughtful of Micki to give those treasures to you. Truly wonderful.
Robin — I have been looking through the photos. There are so many it’s going to take me a long time to get through them, much less scan them. I’m going to have to be very selective.