In July I wrote about Slovak coal miners and provided a link to site that had historical photographs. And then I discovered this photo in my own collection:
Obviously this is my great-grandfather on May 31, 1929 coming home from the mines. I love the lunch pail and the miner's hat. I believe the words at the top are Slovak for "Dad home from work." My great-aunt Bette (this man's daughter) had an album with that old black paper and she pasted her pictures in the album and wrote on them. I don't appreciate that she wrote on the actual photos, but thank goodness she told me who and when. I cut the photos out with the black paper still on them.
In any case, I wonder how many historic photographs we genealogists have in our collections? Now that we have digital capabilities, do we have a responsibility to send theses images to the proper archives? And if so, how do we find out what those depositories are? You can do a default choice by geography--such as the blah blah County Historical Society. However, isn't a subject-oriented society better, such as the Slovak Coal Miners Historical Society (if there were such a thing?)? Decisions, decisions. And of course, I've just added another item on the never ending "to do" list of each genealogist.
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