This discussion reminds me of something I saw during a trip to New York City last year. On a Saturday afternoon I visited a flea market held in a parking lot in lower Manhattan. Most of the items for sale were antiques, used books and furniture. What grabbed my attention was several boxes on a vendor's table, filled with old black and white photos. I spent almost an hour just flipping through handfuls of loose photographs and nearly all of them looked like the type of family photos that would be priceless additions to any family history materials. Most of the photos did not have any notations on the back. The subject matter of the photos ranged from portraits to birthday parties, even photos of a deceased family member at a wake or funeral. I felt a little sad and frustrated that I was looking through so many photos that would have been valuable to a person who had a connection to them. Unfortunately, the path the photos took to end up in a box at a flea market most certainly stripped away necessary context and kept them from being useful family history materials. I suppose the only possible way to keep such materials from disappearing forever is to guide them to organizations that can preserve them for future research purposes. As a side observation, my experience underscores the durability of some of our older forms of media. I was able to view and examine photographs that were anywhere from 70-80 years old and they looked pretty good in spite of rough handling and poor storage conditions. By contrast, I own 3.5 inch computer discs containing data files that are a modest 20 years old and I am not able to access them using any of my new computers. The only computer I have that can read them is a Macintosh that was made in 1994. ----- Original Message ---- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sunday, October 14, 2007 10:10:16 AM Subject: [NCDOGS] Old photos & tin types To DOGS members, I probably have the same dilema many of you have, lots of old UNidentified photos & tin types of family members. I hate to just dispose of them so I'm asking if you know of any Historical Society or similar group that would be happy to have them? Looking forward to your replies----------------charlotte hyer ************************************** See what's new at http://www.aol.com ************************* Visit the D-OGS web site: http://www.rootsweb.com/~ncdogs/ Please post all queries using the D-OGS query form: http://www.rootsweb.com/~ncdogs/memquery.html ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com