Cleaning my drawer sometime back I chanced upon a colored photograph of my departmental colleagues from the time I had just cleared my post-graduation in orthopedics. Below the photograph was a type written note gummed to the cardboard mount of the photograph, bearing the names of the people in the photograph in all the rows, left to right, sitting and standing. What a neat method, I had thought to myself, for making sure whoever sees the photograph knows who is who.
That was face tagging as we know it now, and it was before digital photography came to help us mark people for posterity. Well I was happy for this photograph and the memories of the experiences it conjured for me.
By coincidence, the next day, a cousin sent me by email a scanned copy of an old group photograph, a black and white, with the identifying note below the photograph missing.
In that photograph there were about thirty five and odd people.
In the front row there were some small children sitting. The smallest child in the photograph , a girl, was sitting on the left. All I could say with surety was that this little girl was my grandfather's youngest sister. I was willing to hazard a guess about one or two other people, amongst the seniors in the photograph, as to who they could be, but all the others were unknown to me.
A pang of guilt and pain swept through me at the thought that though most of these people in the photograph must have been related to me by blood I wasn't even able to identify them- these people who must have nursed my grand-uncles and aunts, my father and his siblings, were now strangers to me. A whole tapestry of familial bonding was likely to be lost.
Though the gap of generations between them and myself could not be more than the count of two, these people who were my very own, were so unknown to me, with just a little bit of their lives' stories evident on their faces. I picked up the phone and asked my dad to identify these people for the sake of posterity ( he had also received the same email).
By a stroke of one more unimaginable coincidence, the next week, another cousin posted an old family photograph from my maternal side, on the social network. This time the count of generations was 0 & 1, and though my aunts were little girls and I wasn't even there then, I could identify all the people in the photograph, my cousins and our respective parents included. This time, I thought, let me tag the photograph, just in case my children or my nieces and nephews happen to chance upon it down the line. They will perhaps thank the guy who had the sense to tag their ancestors.
I smiled as I toyed the with thought that technology is not bad all the time!
That was face tagging as we know it now, and it was before digital photography came to help us mark people for posterity. Well I was happy for this photograph and the memories of the experiences it conjured for me.
By coincidence, the next day, a cousin sent me by email a scanned copy of an old group photograph, a black and white, with the identifying note below the photograph missing.
In that photograph there were about thirty five and odd people.
In the front row there were some small children sitting. The smallest child in the photograph , a girl, was sitting on the left. All I could say with surety was that this little girl was my grandfather's youngest sister. I was willing to hazard a guess about one or two other people, amongst the seniors in the photograph, as to who they could be, but all the others were unknown to me.
A pang of guilt and pain swept through me at the thought that though most of these people in the photograph must have been related to me by blood I wasn't even able to identify them- these people who must have nursed my grand-uncles and aunts, my father and his siblings, were now strangers to me. A whole tapestry of familial bonding was likely to be lost.
Though the gap of generations between them and myself could not be more than the count of two, these people who were my very own, were so unknown to me, with just a little bit of their lives' stories evident on their faces. I picked up the phone and asked my dad to identify these people for the sake of posterity ( he had also received the same email).
By a stroke of one more unimaginable coincidence, the next week, another cousin posted an old family photograph from my maternal side, on the social network. This time the count of generations was 0 & 1, and though my aunts were little girls and I wasn't even there then, I could identify all the people in the photograph, my cousins and our respective parents included. This time, I thought, let me tag the photograph, just in case my children or my nieces and nephews happen to chance upon it down the line. They will perhaps thank the guy who had the sense to tag their ancestors.
I smiled as I toyed the with thought that technology is not bad all the time!
2 comments:
great contribution to continuity, family history...
<3 it!:)
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