family tree

Over the last couple of years, I've become very curious about my family history, as told through photographs. My maternal grandparents emigrated to South Africa just after World War II, there being nothing left for them in Europe, with my uncle - still quite young - in tow on the three-month-long boat journey.

Along with grainy, faded images of their life in Europe before they came across, I've also found fascinating images of South Africa in the 1940s - Durban harbour, the airport before security became an issue, a public swimming pool, a worker gang in town central. They're a slice of history that I'm not finding in some history book, but within my family's own collective. I love it.

Gathering what I could from my uncles and mom, I've begun the long process of scanning all the photographs. My first mission is simply to preserve the images, some of them badly faded and crumbling. Next I'm hoping to find a simple and effective way to upload them so that my family around the world can also see them, help identify them, and hopefully share some of their own.

They started off in a Wordpress blog, but that really doesn't serve my purposes for photographs very well. I've now moved them on to Flickr, as it's a two-click process from within iPhoto to get them there, but this still isn't quite right.
Hopefully I'll stumble on something soon, but until then you'll see regular updates on the right of this blog as I slowly complete mission one - preserve a piece of my history -->