My mother, too, is incredibly determined to find things once she gets fixated. According to her, the Lord took her those detective gifts and gave them to me twofold.
My grandparents, I don’t think, have ever seen themselves young. Not adult young. Teenager young. Child young. I’m pretty sure they’ve never seen any pictures of themselves as children, and for the longest time, the youngest photo we ever had of them is from their wedding-honeymoon, where they were freshly turned 21.
We’ve definitely tried to retrieve more, though. Often times it leads to nowhere, especially since the public usually doesn’t have the same level of access to archived physical things. Their graduating class even has a Facebook group dedicated to making a yearbook of their own, and you want to know why? The funny thing is, there are entire yearbook scans uploaded on the internet from their time at high school. And the sad part? The Class of 67, sandwiched between the misfortune of Classes 66 and 68, never got yearbooks due to a hurricane. Another subsequent hurricane many years down the line destroyed the beautiful watercolor rendition of my grandfather’s graduation photo. Out of the members of my immediate family, my mom was the only one to see it. We have never seen my grandparents any younger than twenty-one.
On Friday night, I was browsing the obits for my own reasons, and then from there I get on the mental topic of my grandparents again. Then I’m opening an Incognito tab, and I’m searching for my grandparents again.
By then, I’d already spent a few hours browsing yearbooks after I’d forgotten what year they graduated, but my heart picked up a little after I did the math. I accessed the yearbooks on that awful Classmates site using a temporary email, because they had a high-quality scan of the yearbook from 1965, the year they would’ve been freshman. I was scanning the names of homeroom pictures and praying that they attended school that day. Everything was arranged alphabetically, so I remember thinking that, if I didn’t see my grandma’s name, then they’re just not there.
But the moment my eyes landed on her name, they snapped to the exact spot she was in, and I immediately recognized her. All the women in my family have the tendency to look the exact same throughout the years.
I got excited, and I found my grandpa after that soon after. I literally couldn’t believe my eyes, that we’d be so lucky as to find their class photos- and in such high quality, too- in a perfectly preserved PDF file online.
I emailed them to my mom as a surprise, and once she managed to find it in her inbox, she got up from the dinner she’d just sat down to eat to show them immediately.
I wanted to be apart of the fun, too! So I called my mom up, and got to hear the exact moment they exclaimed, “What!” and saw the photos. It was a task we thought impossible, but after all these years, one of us finally managed to find my grandparents when they were still young adults themselves.
My grandpa was sort of hidden in the dark, unfortunately, so there’s still no clear photo of him, but my grandmother was so cute! And now we can comparatively say that their offspring looks exactly like them, too!
My mom said they just stared and stared and stared in amazement. I wonder what they were thinking of on their trip down memory lane.
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It’s not often I get to make groundbreaking discoveries like that, but when I do, they’re always worthwhile! Last time, I found a short video clip of my mom back during her time in school, another one who seems elusive to the camera. I think that’s the familial disposition, though. All of us seem to avoid photography, not always on purpose. It seems to be a privacy thing.
At least my kids are going to (sort of) have a collection of pictures from when I was a child. I currently boast the most photographs out of anyone in my family, and that’s exactly why I became their photographer, now. When they’re all gone, what am I gonna have to stare at?! That’s why it’s important to take photos in the moment! Now!
Next up is seeing if I can locate any pictures of my mom back from her high school and/or college slash pre-me days, because she only ever started taking pictures after I was born. And now we’re also undertaking the monumental task of sifting through Air Force photos to see if my grandpa can be located. And I want to make (digital) watercolor portraits for the both of them to replace the ones they’ve lost. We have a lot of preserving history to be done!