Photographic Nightmare

The Full Hunter Moon (plus one) is climbing and Cygnus the Swan is high overhead, flying along the Milky Way. I like the winter constellations like Pegasus (the Great Square), Orion (the most obvious constellation in the sky), and then later, Leo (that's mine). Occasionally I get ambitious and try to find the Andromeda Galaxy (just off one corner of Pegasus in the constellation Andromeda, hence the name).

Yesterday, DH and I spent about 4 hours at his mother's, going through her photos. ACK! Very little organization. She has about a dozen albums, but they're those "magnetic page" ones. Half of them open up as you turn the pages because they don't have enough static and the other half have STICKY pages, so once something's in there, it's IN there. A terrible thing to do to photos, especially the older ones that I'd like to scan. And what's not in the albums is in photo envelopes, file folders, regular mail envelopes, boxes, etc. in a plastic storage tub.

So yesterday's time was mainly spent going through pictures and asking MIL who was who, if I didn't already know, and writing names on the backs. Oh brother! Her memory got worse as the afternoon wore on. Somebody she said was Joe Blow at noon became John Doe at 3 pm in a different picture. If it was obvious to me that she was wrong about a name, I just left it off or put a ?. We brought two tubs home with us and last night I started going through and sorting out duplicates, photos from different time periods (it's easy with dated pictures), and some other categories. Today, I continued the same. I'm still not done.

And nothing personal if you, dear reader, are the same kind of person, but MIL saved every stinkin' card - birthday, Easter, St. Patrick's Day, Valentine's Day, get well, retirement, Secretary's Day, you name it - she ever received, not to mention wedding invitations, programs, tickets, hospital bracelets (her own, not her son's), shreds of ribbons and fake flowers from wedding favors, newspaper articles about some neighbor's kid or somebody she worked with, etc. We are gonna have one helluva bonfire when she goes.

One good thing that has come out of "The Great Photo Roundup" is that I've found some old pictures of MIL's maternal grandmother. Here's one of them.
I already have a bunch of her father's mother. I've been e-mailing to a 2nd cousin of hers (who is actually DH's age), so as I scan them, I send them to him. There are also some of DH's father as a youngster and teen and of his grandfather, which I'll be passing along to DD and DGD. DH is voluntarily estranged from his father - hasn't had contact in about 40 yr. - but DD would like to know more about him and his family, so I've been working on that genealogy, too.