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Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Time Travel Tuesday: Foxy Grandma

timetraveltuesday-1950s-grandmaswimming

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There are so many beautiful things about the first photo of my grandma with two of my uncles.

First is that darling swimsuit she's wearing. I absolutely love it. It's cool to know she wore the high-waist swimsuit style that's gotten really trendy again over the past few summers.

There's also my Uncle Rege, on the left, who's picking his nose. Classic.

But I think what I love most about this is that this is a new side of my grandma I never saw, as a young mother, probably not much older than me.

She died when I was 14, so while I knew her well from a grandma-type perspective, I never got to look through these photos and ask her about them when I was going through shoe boxes of old photos at my parents' house a few years ago. I only knew her with white hair, a perm, who was almost always sipping on a cup of coffee when I saw her. I know she hated being photographed when she was older, so she might have been the same way here, trying to look away from the camera. Or maybe she saw something in the distance. Who knows. I'm not even sure where they were, but my mom said her family went to New England beaches a lot as kids.

From the how old my uncles look here, I'm guessing this was taken in the mid-1950s, perhaps even before my mom was born. (My mom is four years younger than my uncle on the left and two years younger than my uncle on the right.)

I started digitally archiving family photos a couple years ago, but never got around to putting the scanned photos into albums to distribute. Someday soon, I hope. I even considered doing interviews with family members to bring a more detailed narrative to the photos, but that, of course, would take a lot of time and effort.

I just love that this moment was captured because the expressions in it are so candid. The second photo is cute too, but I mostly put that in because my grandma's face can be seen in it. I hope these are photos that can be enjoyed for generations to come.

Do you have any photos like this of older and/or deceased family members when they were younger?

6 comments:

  1. Ah these are beautiful. One of my most prized possessions is a old carved wooden box my grandmother gave me full of family photos. I love going through it every once in a while. I also am always insanely jealous of my grandmothers and other people's grandmothers clothes. Is that weird, they just always look like they had great fashion sense and I wish I could rifle through all the now vintage clothes they wore.

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    1. The box sounds so precious. That's great you have a memento from her. I wish our grandmas saved some of their old clothes!

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  2. Aw I love seeing people's old family photos and these shots are so great! Both of my sets of grandparents have quite a few pictures from when they were younger so I consider myself lucky to be able to see them. I love looking at the clothes and being reminded that they were once my age too.

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    1. Glad you have old photos of your grandparents too. It's like having a little piece of your personal history.

      And I love being able to share these online now, because I just shared these, and a lot of my extended family had never seen these shots before.

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  3. Aww, your grandma is so beautiful! I always say I got my style from my grandmother because she had 4 closets filled to the brim with clothing and then she even had some stored up in her attic. Sadly, like yours, mine passed away when I was 14 so that was before I got into style and before I could ask her any questions that I have now. Grandmas are so precious.

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    1. That's so cool! Man, if only our grandmas knew that their old closets could be worth today.

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