Since I have been going through all of the photos that my folks took, down through the years, I have started working on organizing them into categories by area (state/town), and by the time period. I am using my online photo storage to help organize all of the pictures and then write information about each one , assuming that I know the information. Some of the pictures are of people my parents knew way before I was born, and my mom just put first names, if she wrote anything at all. So, now, I am also doing some ancestry research, to try and find who these family members are/were, and how I am related to them. I think that before I am done with this project, I will want to make some kind of an online family tree record that I can coordinate relationship and also add the pictures that I have been scanning . I went though all of the pictures that I have; so I do have an idea of what is there, scanned some of them already, and now, I am going to work my way back through each packet of old pictures and put them in a labeled freezer bag. This way, each bag will have pictures for a specified time or place and will be easier for us to find something when we are looking for a specific picture.
Well, already I have come across an interesting situation in sorting through the pictures. My parents moved from Idaho to Southern California around 1929, and apparently, my dad's parents also went down there to visit relatives and just to see that part of the country, since there are lots of pictures that my mom took of different places that would have been sightseeing stops back in the day. This is all fine and good; but then I was looking at the information about my grandparents on "Find a Grave", and they said that my grandfather died in 1914 ! This would have been way before my parents met each other, or were even grown up. There is a picture of the gravestone, and it does look like it says 1914, but it is very faded and almost unreadable. I remember my folks told me that my grandfather died before I was born; so it is possible that the actual date is 1944, and part of the 4 is just faded too much to read. Then, we have another problem. It also says that he was born in 1850, which would have made him much older than my grandmother, and nearly 100 years old when he died, and I don't remember my folks saying that he was that old either; so now I am questioning both dates. My grandfather is buried in Idaho; so my son who lives there could actually go and look at the grave and see what the dates are on the gravestone, but they are buried under snow up there for the next month or so. Here is a picture of my parents and grandparents, and my dad's brother visiting a place called Mt. Helix, and the photo is dated from 1930. They are standing in front of a large cross that is on a hill. The second picture is how it looks now, and you can see that they had to climb a pretty steep hill to get up there and actually stand in front of the cross.