Treasure Chest Thursday: 44 Years of Kodak

Note: I don’t mean to show a bias towards Kodak. It is strictly coincidence that I found this after my Tech Tuesday post. Except I don’t believe in coincidences, so it’s really one of those crazy freaky things that follows me around. Again, I am not being compensated by Kodak for this post.

I had photos on the brain yesterday. I was actually sorting through some of my scanned photos trying to decide if I was going to rescan the last batch at a higher DPI. That’s when I remembered this box in the spare room. It’s there with a suitcase full of sympathy cards that were sent to Llewellyn after William‘s death.

I remember opening this up before but I think I was too busy pouring over documents. I probably saw that these were negatives of some sort and decided to check later if they were negatives of pictures I already had. I should have been tipped off to the fact that these were kept separately.

So yesterday, I started going through the box. It was then I realized these were slides and not negatives. Or are they negatives that are mounted as slides? Is that the same thing. This shows you how much I know about these things. Obviously I need to do a bit more research.

On this box I noticed a name that I found on the back of a photo. Gladys Walker. I’m almost certain that Gladys Walker is a relation who lived in the Detroit area. This all feels more likely to me because I found Detroit written on the back of some photos and Ralph Leonard even spent a few years there. If there was family there, then Ralph’s brief time there is better explained.

It was when I stuck one of the slides into this that I realized I could possibly have more pictures than I thought.

I’ve got a lot of pictures. There is one big batch of a trip to Florida. So I’m thinking these slides could be from William and Llewellyn’s travels. My father says they traveled around a bit. Unfortunately, the light is broken in the viewer that I found in the box. I’m putting a new one on my Christmas wish list and I’m hoping that my slides will fit into a new one.

If that’s the case, I have a lot of slides to go through.

This box says Moore and 86 Park Avenue. So I’m now positive these slides are William and Llewellyn’s. The date of 1966 gives me a time frame that pretty much matches the photos I have of Llewellyn and William in Florida.

There’s a lot of Kodak in that box. I’ve used Kodak for 10 years myself. It was my first digital camera. It’s kind of comforting when I find these things in my family tree. I’ve grown up without a lot of family around me. So I never really felt a lot of connections to the past. Which is probably why I am a literal sponge when my grandma gave me that family tree. I remember distinctly being amazed that you could actually know your family back that far.

Now that I know my Dad’s side of the family, it’s amazing all the different things I find that link me to things. Just finding a box full of Kodak slides made me giddy. Like I had yet another connection to these people I’m learning were a lot like me. So that’s at least 44 years of Kodak history in our family, it’s kind of a nice feeling.

Home Again

We made it back from our weekend trip to Jersey. It was touch and go for a little bit, but we made it a little after midnight. I’ve been to very few weddings in my lifetime. It comes from living all by ourselves down here in Maryland. So I walked into this with my mind wide open.

View outside my hotel room.

Then I wondered if it was fate or my cousin was just being the smart alec he’s always been. The hotel where wedding guests were staying was right next to a huge cemetery. It might have freaked a few people out but I couldn’t help but wonder what the oldest date in the cemetery was.

The wedding didn’t start until 2pm on Sunday. That left us with some extra time. We decided to take a small road trip to Dad’s hometown, Caldwell. We drove around seeing all the old houses. Then we decided to go to the cemetery.

Lindsley plot. Prospect Hill Cemetery.

I have only been to Prospect Hill Cemetery once before. I didn’t have a camera at the time. So I never got pictures of the graves myself. Luckily, I’ve had a lot of people that have sent me numerous pictures over the years. It never tops actually going yourself though. Especially because I’m going to use Google Earth to map out where the separate plots were in the cemetery. I didn’t expect them to be so spread out from each other!

Leonard plot. Prospect Hill Cemetery.

Walking around the cemetery, I could definitely see that I’ll have to go back in jeans and sneakers. I only walked about half the cemetery but I did find a Love ancestor I didn’t previously have. Grace Love-Leonard. After walking around a bit, we got in the car and headed to the wedding. My sister summed it up perfectly when she posted to her Facebook while I was walking around the cemetery. “We’re dressed for a wedding and end up walking around a cemetery. Only our family.” My sister had one part wrong though, it’s not only our family! It’s just a genealogy thing!