On my trip to Ontario, I had a chance to stay with my brother and his wife as they live near to Paris, Ontario where I had attended the writers retreat. On a day's outing, I had my first ever look at Niagara Falls, quite an impressive sight.
Not all of our time was spent catching up or sightseeing. My brother brought a stash of our father's papers up from his basement. My visit seemed to be the inspiration for weeding through what was there. Of course, I was madly snapping pictures of records of interest. It was strange to see family history information I had sent to my father that I had found while digging into our family's past. There were other intriguing items like photos of people we couldn't identify although they were clearly of importance and copies of letters with references to events in the larger family that left something to the imagination.
Once the stack of papers had been examined, photographic slides came up from the basement repository. Remember those? As we peered through a handheld viewer, we tried to make out the figures in the images. Some were hard to see and most of them weren't labeled with people's names which would have made identification easier. Surprisingly, there were slides of images from the '50s. They must have been photographs that had been converted to slides, the latest technology at the time.
While going through the papers, I captured so many images on my phone that I'll have to make time to study them in depth. At least in the era that photographic slides were the done thing there weren't as many of them to go through as there are in these days of point and shoot with a phone that is constantly in reach. That brevity must have pleased the audiences pinned down in their seats by good manners as they were subjected to slideshows back in the day.
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