I have a bag of old family photos, and I genuinely don’t remember where they came from. When I say “a bag,” I mean it — it’s a plastic bag that looks like it’s seen better days, and everything in it is loose and looking as if it was just stuffed in there with no rhyme or reason. The contents are a mix of photos from around 90 years ago through, maybe, the turn of the century…? No, wait, a few just after I moved to the United States, so that would be the early 2000s. It’s a heady, quietly awe-inspiring thing to thumb through, seeing the sweep of time go back and forth as I pick through each picture: here’s my grandmother when she was younger than me, getting married; there’s my dad as a baby, so it must be 1941; now my dad is getting married and he looks like a teenager; there’s my sister as a baby; there’s me; and so on.
I don’t often leaf through the bag, because… well, who has time to do that, usually? But an upcoming family occasion had people asking if I had particular photos, so I found the bag and looked through it and realized that I’d utterly forgotten that it isn’t just filled with photos, but all kinds of correspondence and paperwork that clearly belonged to my grandmother at some point. There are telegrams from her husband when he was in the service for World War II, as well as a letter from the government that he’d been killed in action, and a letter from Buckingham Palace sending condolences. Birth certificates from multiple generations of my family on my dad’s side. A whole history of paperwork that I’d entirely forgotten existed, all in this shitty old plastic bag.
It struck me, after going through the bag, that I suddenly wanted to print everything in the world out and put it in bags and boxes and leave it there for people to find years later. I have files and PDFs and JPGs and everything on laptops and devices and CDRs and in the cloud and and and, sure, but it feels like all of those things have a barrier to entry that this bag just doesn’t. Like these days, we’re hiding everything away, but history is just right there in that bag to be discovered.
