I was trying to find my birth certificate this morning. It’s funny that we are supposed to live in the joined up digital world and yet …… we still need to find a bit of paper which is many years old to try and sort stuff out with the government. Grrrr.

So countless shoe boxes later, still no birth certificate (haven’t seen it in years) but I did find some old parent photographs. Black and white photos just have a special quality to them. Feels like history in your hands. Our son can look at them for hours. Tonight he will sit and drink all the history in. The sadness is that I won’t be able to add much detail to them.

It’s still hard to imagine that my dad took part in the Second World War as a young man. I really wish that I had asked more questions. Now our son if he had the opportunity would have been fantastic, he would have probed every little detail from his grandad.

But we still have old photos as our little gateway into the past. The one below is his grandad with the platoon taken during the war in Iceland.

51 thoughts on “Old Photos”

  4. Wow! You must be really proud to have someone interested he family who served into he great war, isn’t it. 🙂 One of my dad’s cousin was a pilot during the war. The war was almost at the end and he had one last round to make, to click photographs or something, to make sure that the enemy is not in the territory. And his plane crashed. I have heard stories of how good a man he was. And I have seen his photograph and a letter, the one he sent to my grandma days before his death.

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      1. Hah! Trust me, when I start singing, my girls immediately put their headphones on so that they cannot hear me! I even disgust myself, but it doesn’t stop me. Nope, no Muppet song, although I am partial to Kermit the Frog’s Rainbow Connection and have even posted it a couple of times. 😉

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  13. Pingback: ♫ Photographs And Memories ♫ | Filosofa's Word

  14. My grandfather died far too soon to share his experiences in WWII with my kids. He rarely, rarely spoke of it with us–well, me, anyway. I’m a girl. I was stuck having fabric patterns pinned to me and visited craft stores. Sigh…

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      1. It is. I didn’t realize how unique it was that I had four grandparents in my childhood. Bo’s parents died before the boys were born, and my father died when the boys were a year old. They’ve only a grandmother, something I just can’t fathom…

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      2. At least he’s had quality time with his grannies. But reading about a relation is nothing like meeting them. This will be a test for him (still being so young) and having his first Christmas without having a grandparent there. The table is going to be so much smaller. Maybe we give a seat to the dog – that would liven this up.

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      3. I bet the dog would love that. 🙂 We have three Christmases this month, one of which we host because it’s the day our children are in the church Christmas program. No clue how many relations from my side we’ll see, but Bo’s side’s pretty small. Small doesn’t equal quiet, though, because my sons are LOUD. 🙂

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      10. What? Well, my side’s like that, too. I never see my cousins, or most of my uncles and aunts, and we never communicate. My godmother’s kin have been more like family to us, and they’re, like, third cousins? They actually WANT to hang out with us…and they don’t drive Bo nuts, which is a bonus…

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      11. That’s good that they want to hang out with you, plus they don’t upset the applecart. No my family are great but have their own circles now and live miles away. My partners family with a couple of exceptions have never really wanted anything to do with me and worryingly our son.

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  15. Looking at your dad’s photo and pondering about identifying people in photos sparked an idea – that paid off.
    When my nan died we found some old photos. One was of Clark Gable with unintelligible writing on the back and another two were of a dashing young man in uniform.
    She died 1996 and since then I’ve tried unsuccessfully to identify him.
    Showing the photos to a mate, who is into thing military, he worked out that one of the uniforms was RNAS – the navy air branch that was merged with the RFC to create the RAF.
    From your post I went over to Ancestry, who, I found, have put on the Royal Navy records. Lo and behold, there is her brother’s Navy record card – with ‘Engt to RAF’ stamped on it.
    Hopefully 2 + 2 ne 5 and I’ve finally identified him.
    Chris

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