of Mystery People...

In case I have never told you, I am a sucker for family stories. I don't know dates or names to save my life, but I can sit down and listen to my grandma speak about the past for hours - and it has actually happened that we sit down and when I look at the clock again it's already dinner time.
She used to know all of the "goss" of our entire family, and she took on the difficult task of keeping my grandfather's family history in order. My grandpa was the youngest of 9 siblings, and he didn't even live with his parents for a portion of his life.
Anyway... if you put together the fact that I am a photo junkie and a sucker for family stories you get one thing: photography pack rat.
When my uncle Jean passed away in April, I was pretty devastated about that fact that my grandmother NEVER sat him down with pictures and asked him to tell her about them so that she could pass on the information down to me. When my uncle died, a lot of our family history from my mom's side died with him. He was the only one to know and keep in touch with my grandpa's family in France. He met many of the people even my grandpa had never met, and had lots of contacts in Europe with people that I - and my family - should've had the right to know at some point in our lives...
... or at least know about them!
When my parents returned from Panama, my mom brought me the one thing she knew I wanted - pictures. She brought me a small box of recent pictures of my uncle as well as a leather-bound album jam-packed with family history. A lot of the pictures are halfway gone because of the terrible conditions in Panama... but I salivated when I opened the album and found old, and I mean old, pictures. Stuff from the 1930s, and I know some things older even than that!
I started taking some pictures off their places and looking on the back - jackpot! dedications! not so jackpot! dedications in french!
I enlisted the French teacher at HHS to help me translate some of them, and we have yet to get together... but today I started scanning some of the pictures of the album, starting with Mystery Woman.
Mystery Woman caught my eye because she is absolutely stunningly gorgeous. She caught my eye because I couldn't find her anywhere else on the album - or at least I could not recognize her. She caught my eye because my uncle had taken the time to organize and carefully place her pictures on the very back of the album in some sort of order AND with the dedication at the very center. My heart raced as I started thinking "was that a past love, was it a platonic thing, was it his girlfriend, was it a family member, was it someone special?" The rest of the album? not so organized. Mystery Woman? organized - and beautifully, if I might add!
So, you will start to run into some old school pictures of my family history... I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

xoxo,
B