1,800th Image

"Malcolm, Farnum, and Gilbreth - Walnut Lake, May 1920"
Where is this Walnut Lake? Assuming that these are last names, what are their first names? 
And which are which?  
BTW, this is not the 1,800th hundred image.  Just an example of what I have to work with sometimes.

There is an old saying that everyone dies twice.  Once when the body and soul cease to exist, and the second time, the last time your name is uttered aloud. 

Cookie believes that in the last 170 years or that photography has been a part of people's lives, there are also a third, and a fourth death.  

The third is when the person's gravesite is lost. 

And the fourth, when there is no longer an image of that person or their markers. 

Today, at noon, Cookie uploaded his 1,800th image to Find A Grave.  Of that, about 300 are tombstones and grave markers. 

And 1,500 are pictures of the deceased person.

I write this, Not to brag, but to observe.   It's that whole "fourth type of death" that cookie wants to undo.

So that has meant spending years, pouring over pictures, comparing photographs, ambrotypes, daguerreotypes, then scanning, cropping, correcting, restoring, and uploading.  And when I couldn't find a memorial, searching records & census forms, looking at others family trees*, searching old books, registrations, and walking graveyards, then creating the memorials once they have been proven. Then I create the memorials for the descendants and upload that picture, or pictures, of people like you and me, people who never thought about fading from memory. 

Not all of the pictures are what I would call "winning" images.  Many were taken 100+ years ago using crude Kodak box and Brownie cameras, the film for which is horrible at the contrast.  Or they were taken with the color film other than Kodachrome, which presents its own horror as the dyes have long been broken down so that everything is PINK.

And to fix these, I have been teaching myself Photoshop CC.  No easy task because I was taught to use lighter-duty programs.  After two years I consider myself a beginner.   I still have a long, long way to grow. 

I should add that I have never once used an AI program to autocorrect an image, or worse, color it.  

For example, I just finished a photo album belonging to a long-gone cousin who made friends everywhere she went.  100 pages, 500 images of people, places, and events.  Only about 75 people be ID's right off the bat and found online.  Another 100+ had to be fully researched, traced, and their memorials created.   I still have approximately 175-200 people for which I only have first, or last names, like SMITH, TOUEY, McBRIDE, or SUSAN, AMELIA, JIM.  Some have nicknames like SPOTS, WINKIE, SIS, and something called the "The FARQUARTET" whatever that is.  The frustrating ones are the ones like this:  "My relative Suze" and "Liz's ex-husband, SPATS."

Not enough people named DUCKY, UNC, and SPATS.  Where oh where are you, SPATS?

I have a lovely photo of "Dickie in his new Nash" dated "September last".  Is it 1919, 1920, or 1921? 

DAMN IT, these people have names!  Help me, Jesus.  Seriously.  Enlighten me.

And so when I finish this post, I will dive back in, trying to jog something in my head between an early seen image and a later one.

My other push to do this is that while we live in a world of photography, the pictures are surviving as we think they are.  Polaroids are darkening, color snapshots are yellowing, their blacks fading, and CDV and Cabinet card images are slowly fading away for a variety of reasons.  So time is not our friend, my friends.

Mark those pictures, people.  Having something is better than nothing!

So I will do this until I can no longer do this. I will keep at this task.  

No one deserves to be forgotten.  And Cookie is doing his damnedest to make sure that I get through as many of these before the day comes when someone has to make a memorial for me.

The bestest present for a young Cookie

 

Children gather 'round.  The picture above is 1964/1965 PLAYMOBILE, the BESTEST Christmas ever for a young Cookie (I was but a dollop of dough in those years), and oh, how I loved it so. 

It served no purpose but to keep children with imaginations busy.  And how lucky I was to get one, one Christmas from my gentile grandparents (I had a set of gentile grandparents and a set of Jewish parents.)  

With batteries, you could make the turn indicators blink and I think the windshield wipers swept to and fro.   The dashboard was made from good quality Styrene plastic, which was stable, but the windshield was made from acetate plastic, which was the only fly in the ointment.  Acetate plastics over time warp - and like every other Playmobile set up like this I have seen since on eBay, the windshield developed a sunken sag along the top middle. 

Overtime, mine was tossed and I think my parents left it at our old house for the children of the buyers to play with. 

This is something that I never forgave my parents for.  

And I am not joking. 

Alas, now I am too old, and have too much fine art to accommodate one should I find one at an antique market. 

This makes me sad - not for me - but for children to come. 

Driving the Playmobile required a lot of imagination.  And that's something that I think children are being robbed of by all this new technology today.  On the other hand, I am sure what people in their sixties in the 1960s thought about those of us born in the 1960s.

In any event, whenever I see one of these, for a moment, I am again a three or four-year-old and I marvel at it.  And part of me really wants Santa to bring me one. 

Meat PARTY!

 

This is from an ad for the American Meat Producers Association.  

The message?  Do you want a party that people will remember for ages to come?  Serve MEAT.  And plenty of MEAT. 

Because only MEATiest pieces of MEAT can give your guests the energy to get through an evening of square dancing.  A night of Pictionary.  A night of Disco. 

Only MEAT can help you throw a real barn burner, metaphorically, speaking.  Because burning a barn is probably illegal, and besides, that is where you keep your beef cattle.  

So maybe not a barn burner.  

But be sure there is plenty of MEAT to go-go around. 

Cookie is done with "SCOTT"...

We have all been there, right?

There you are: you are living your life, and the phone rings CONSTANTLY with people in poor countries pestering you with robotically dialed calls.  They tell you their name is something hard to believe because it seems unlikely that someone from that part of the world would name their child "Darrell" or "Betty", but we knew that isn't their real name.   And they are constantly trying to sell you something that no one would ever buy over the phone, like Medicare coverage.  

This morning, it was SCOTT, and it was a doozy of pitch: 

"Hello, my name is SCOTT, and I am calling from the FEDERAL DEPARTMENT OF VISA AND MASTERCARD." 

As if.  A "Federal Department" of Visa and Mastercard?  Seriously? 

Cookie was tempted to just hang up - after all, I once worked with financial institutions rolling out new credit card programs.  

I know how it works.  From the accounting to the "online or batch" processing, to even designing the face of your card.

I even remember the cardboard wheel of "chargeback" calculators we used to use.

But Cookie is a picker.  Pick, pick, pick, pick, pick. 

So Cookie said: "my, you sound important?"

"Yes," says he, "and I am calling to tell you that you must provide me with your credit card number now or I will discontinue and have you arrested."

Oh, SCOTT, do you have any idea that this isn't the way anything is done?

"YES! You must do this now as there are security police and the FBI on their way to arrest you for noncompliance!"

Reader, do you know what Cookie did?   Cookie said: SCOTT, Isn't this a bit like a ten-year-old screaming a threatening 'My father is going to sue you for being mean to me,' to another kid on the playground?

I mean, really, SCOTT.  Security Forces AND the FBI?   But there was SCOTT on the other end of the phone getting ready to have a seizure over this make-believe acting gig.

So, I hung up on SCOTT, even as he continued screaming at me into the phone. 

Cookie is so done with these people.  SCOTT needs some weed and mellow, because, dude, it wasn't working. 

But if they are going to keep calling, I am going to be irascible. 

Hello, it's been a while

 

And it has been a while - like six weeks. 

I wish I could report back and say that we have been on a madcap caprice around the world, but alas, Cookie is pretty much COVID precaution homebound here. 

And suffice it to say that the only excitement in the coming months is travel to Cincinnati for a wedding, ugh.  Luckily, my friend is the mother of the bride and the bride and groom are very loveable.  Still, no huggie wuggies of physical contact from any guest and full face mask on.  "Really aunt Trudy, so nice to see you, but let's not potentially pass on a deadly disease.

Cookie won't even partake in communion!

But I do wish it was someplace other than Cincinnati. Cookie has just never warmed to the place. Never will, either. 

If we were going to Columbus, or Cleveland, well then, Cookie has scads of things that could be done or friends visited.  So alas, we are literally flying in, and then turning around and leaving. 

On the plus side, Husband and I are fully vaccinated and boosted. 

I wish there was something earth-shattering to share, but maybe peace and quiet is a gift.