Sunday Dinner & Old Photographs

For many years, my husband, daughter and I have gathered around this table at my in-laws' house for many Sunday and holiday dinners ever since B. was an infant and her cousins were babies themselves. There for awhile, especially during football season, we would spend every Sunday afternoon at my husband's parents' house with his parents, brother, sister and their families. My mother-in-law is getting up there in years and will be 77 later on this month and so we don't have Sunday dinner together as often as we did years ago, but we still do every once in awhile. Which is nice.  I am very thankful that family is so important to my mother-in-law. And although we've had our struggles over the years, we've gotten through them and I've grown to actually love spending time with my in-laws. I think growing older and seeing our children and parents grow older makes you really appreciate the time you have to spend with your loved ones.  

Anyway, my mother-in-law invited us all over for dinner yesterday for homemade gnocchis, meatballs, spaghetti, salad, and bread. Afterwards, she pulled out a couple of shoe boxes with old family pictures from when my husband was growing up and old heritage photos of his grandparents and great-grandparents from his dad's side of the family. My mother-in-law tends to talk a lot about the past lately. She's been like that for awhile now. Anyway, yesterday, out of the blue, she brought out the boxes of pictures and just started going through them and rattling on about who was in them one right after the other. I had to make her slow down so I could actually write the info on the backs of the pictures. She let me take a big ziploc bag of them home to copy and I am going to start with that. 

It is overwhelming the amount of photos she has. A lot of which was given to her by someone in the family when they did a clean-out of someone's house years ago. Some of the pictures she didn't know much about (from my father-in-law's side) and that's sad. But a lot she did know who was in them, so that's good at least. She invited us up for dinner at 1:30 yesterday and we ate probably around 2:00, and so we had already been there awhile and my husband wanted to leave so he could start plowing snow with the tractor. I told him to just leave me there and come back to get me later when he was done plowing everyone's driveways. There was no way I was passing up an opportunity to get my hands on more heritage photos and to get the information about who, what, where, etc. was going on in the photos. So I was up there until sometime in the evening. It was definitely worth it. And I didn't even make it all the way through all the pictures she has.  

Now I have to get all of these pictures scanned and send copies to my husband's sister and brother. This is only the first big batch though. My sister-in-law somehow ended up with some genealogy stuff from their dad's side of the family and keeps saying she's going to copy it all for her brothers. It goes clear back to Ireland. So I can't wait to see what she has. We already have my mother-in-law's father's side traced back to when they immigrated through Ellis Island from Italy. That was the heritage album I did for her a few years ago that I shared on here during that whole process.

While going through all those old photos, I noticed that the really old black and white photos held up better than when they started doing color pictures. Those ones are faded. Whatever ink they used for color in the beginning must not have been very good for the long term. Plus who knows what conditions these old pictures were stored in over the years. Another good reason to get these pictures copied before they completely fade away someday. 

I recently got my husband to set up the computer so I can start scanning all the heritage pictures from my mom of my German ancestors that I posted about awhile back. My plan is to get all of these old pictures from my mom and my husband's mom scanned into the computer and upload them to Walgreens and get a few printed out to make sure they turn out okay.  When I scanned all those old pictures for my mother-in-law a few years ago, I used the scanners at WalMart, and they would always print out really nice. Then I would always get a CD of the pics made while I was there. I'm trying to avoid WalMart when it comes to doing this more current project since they are very nit-picky. I hope scanning from home and uploading to have printed out later works out. So these are a couple of the big projects I'll be working on this year and then eventually I hope to get them into scrapbooks. 

Well that is all for now. I took B. to pick out new eyeglasses after school today. The big snowstorm that we were anticipating ended up being more south of us and the kids ended up only having a two-hour delay this morning. Ah well. Only seventeen more days until the first day of Spring....