A relative bestowed upon me a treasure of family photographs that had been tucked away for decades. Our extended family has deep roots in the emigration of Italian men and women to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — to New York City, to Boston and to small towns in Massachusetts. The family tree has several branches, some quite familiar, some still mysterious. Our research did not go far into the extended family — that is, second marriages, or second cousins, those they married, and the children they produced. The immediate family has always been tight, but we had less contact with those in the outer orbits.
While I found many familiar faces among the trove of photos given to me — aunts and uncles, my parents when they were young — I can’t identify a single person, save one, you see on this post.
So, naturally, I wonder who they were, and whether they spoke with Italian accents, and what they did to earn a living, and what they talked about when they gathered. I wonder if they had telephones. I wonder if the men smoked. I wonder how they shaved. I wonder if the women made their own dresses. I wonder what the clothes of the day felt like — the men’s shirts, their Sunday suits.
I assume most were born in Italy and emigrated here, arriving in Boston Harbor or Ellis Island. Many of them appear in formal studio photographs — wedding photos, high school portraits. Many were related to my mother and her siblings, but how? I don’t know.
And it’s not like they are going to see this post and come forward. These people are gone. I can’t imagine that anyone, except for those who were children at the time, could still be alive today. I wonder who they were. I wish the collector of these photos had written something on the back of each — a name, a year.
Thirty-six years ago I went to the old country — Portugal, not Italy — to try and locate relatives on my father’s side of the family. I wanted to find the house where he and his parents had resided before they emigrated to America. I had limited information. I came close, landing on the street where they’d lived, but I was unable to confirm exactly which stuccoed house had been theirs. A woman who helped me in the quest expressed sympathy for my failure to locate relatives or find my father’s birthplace. “You are chasing ghosts,” she said, wrapping me in the kind of comforting melancholy one gets from a fadista. I had come close to the origin of my family, on my father’s side — close enough to feel a connection. I feel the same now as I look at these old, precious photographs from my mother’s side; some, if not most, were people she knew and probably loved, and that’s enough for me. Alla famiglia!
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I love old family photos and have a nice collection—and I know who they are. But my grandmother had a personal album and one of the photographs, of a beautiful smiling woman, appeared twice, with no name. I imagined she was a good friend of my grandmother’s and wrote a poem about what she told me about her. I framed her picture.
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You write so gracefully so easily… Enviously yours,
/josh
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I love this post. You look like many of the faces in these photos. I, too, have a treasure trove of old, unidentified family photos. I wish I knew their names and stories. Thanks for bringing up some memories, Mary London
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I can relate! 🎃
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Vintage
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I have boxes of photo albums in storage because my mother was the keeper. Other family members made copies as long as my mother was with them to guard the pictures in the process or I did because she didn’t want to let them go, bought a special printer to do so and since my father was a photographer it wasn’t that big of a deal but I even have a world war II postcard from my grandfather to my grandmother when he was on a brief leave and was able to enjoy the officers club with a soldier of color who saved his life the previous month by pushing him into a trench, then following. I love looking at these and I’m sorry you don’t have more information on them because my mother took the time to write the year at minimum (and who was in it) but this is our history and heritage. I guess I should digitize them and I was in the process of doing it myself when life took a turn but I’m afraid to send them off somewhere and I have to laugh whenever a family member argues with me about any specific dates because I have the dated and specifically placed documented pictures. Everything’s in the most simplistic wedding pictures to the country folk making moonshine. Such a treasure and I’m sorry it took so long to see this column listed. I guess I was in the middle of a lot and took a break from anything requiring brain cells that were being used for other things but they are treasures. Sadly when they died, meaning my grandparents, the three daughters had bags separated for Goodwill and trash and the trash haulers took the Goodwill bags, supposedly an error, which had everything from military medals to some very nice wedding and family photo albums of multi-generations and years of family military service photos. We still flea /junk market occasionally looking for any of those photo albums just in case….. Oh I wish I had seen this sooner but I was having trouble with the app and like I said I was off of anything social for a few years. This is such a treasure.
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