Digging Roots

I have been spending almost all my time for the last month scanning, restoring and posting Wu family pictures. They were everywhere when we moved Chris's parents out of their home of 50 years.
Until the late 1970s, I didn't know this family at all so it's been an amazing journey to discover their history through these pictures. This is Uncle Pete who, according to the back of another picture,"ran away to join the circus." He was Frankie's great uncle, her mother's brother. I can tell from the pictures that he lived and played music in Chicago and had a beautiful wife who was also musical.

Even photos of people whose names and histories I will never know are fascinating to me. I think about how they chose what to wear, if the portrait celebrated a special event and what they did after their portraits were completed.

So do you wonder how I can spend so much time restoring these pictures? Here's a small before and after. To save the original images, each of the speckles on the original has to be removed individually.

It's incredibly time-consuming and makes for sore fingers, elbows and shoulders. I hope that someday someone will be as excited to find someone they wanted to know about or an image that speaks to them even though they know nothing about the person in the picture.

Since I am spending so much time on these, I'll try to post my favorite image of the day. All of them will be on flickr.