ANTIQUE PHOTOS BLOG

I love antique photos. You can learn so much about how things have changed, and again how little has. We inherited 3 trunks of photos from the late 1800's to the 1940s and 50's. Most came from an enigmatic, extremely hard working but photo-loving woman named Lena, an ancestor of my husband, born in 1879. She had more contacts, more postcards (several hundreds) and more photos of herself taken than anyone who is not a well know celebrity. She seems to have collected antique photos from all around her. She unfortunately didn't identify many, only writing "Lena" on many given to her. I think she assumed she would remember, and of course after that it wouldn't matter!

We are still sorting through all the stuff trying to piece together Lena's fascinating and sometimes tragic life. Meanwhile, here are a variety of photos, including some of the highest (and lowest!) fashion.

I have also included the very old family photos I have from my mom's side of the family.


I hope you enjoy, and thank you for visiting my blog.



Tuesday, August 10, 2010

A disgruntled cat and two strange photos

We're still going through scads of photos. I bought a box of 100 4/page postcard album pages, which I thought would be enough for Lena's antique photo collection: no way!  I got about half way through and ran out of space, and these are only the postcards with messages on the back, not the blank ones!  To my poor math brain this means there are over  800 postcards.

Interesting news, I was looking up values of antique postcards; it turns out we have a few that are probably worth quite a bit of money, due to their subject (one, a very early photo of an old black farmer, another, a 1910 Thanksgiving card, for instance).

Craig is still scanning in old photos.  He'll say he has "about reached the end" then, surprise, he finds another bunch, often including some really antique interesting ones.  I'm glad he has the patience for all that scanning (and fade correcting and filing and categorizing ...!)

Well, today I'm presenting a photo of an obviously unhappy cat; and two rather  unusual  but unrelated photos;


This next photo is of a crooked house. At first I just thought the photo was wonky--but the ground underneath is even; the supports under the right side are longer than on the left; the step vertical supports are uneven. Strange, but I think it's real.  Any comments are welcome.


The next photo is, I assume, an engagement picture. Between the rather unusual-looking moon (kind of sappy, at best) and the lady's long hair, I find this 1911 photos one of the weirdest in our possession.

4 comments:

  1. wow, those are some great, unusual pictures! This is a completely random guess, but I wonder if that house is one of those tourist attractions? Like a gravity hill or something. Cool!

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  2. love the crooked house! And the two WWI soldiers out in front. That's a lot of stairs! Wondering where they are... {:-D

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  3. omg i dont know which photograph i love more! unhappy lion kitty, wonky house or moon engagement picture!

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  4. Hello Flowers,

    Thank you for stopping by! I always enjoy your comments.
    That crooked house is so funny! I wondwhich side of the house they slept in? Looks like everything would slide to the low side. Wow! Thanks for sharing these quirky finds.

    http://vivrelejour.blogspot.com

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