Meeting the Past: Everybody needs a Helen

Helen

I hope everyone has an Aunt Helen in their life.

My Aunt Helen was my grandfather's sister. She never married and lived her whole life with her parents and her older sister, Pauline. By the time I was old enough to get to know her she had advanced Parkinson's Disease. She was sharp, funny, and caring, but generally pretty quiet. She passed away when I was 16 years old and while I would say I was close to her, in many ways I didn't really know her.

I didn't know, for instance, that Helen was an avid photographer. It was well known among my mother's generation that if there was a family gathering it was going to be Helen behind the camera lens. She was also meticulous. She had her photos made into slides, which were then painstakingly documented. Each slide was identified with the date, place, and the names of the people in the image. Every. Single. Slide. Thousands of images chronicling decades of the family, all neatly boxed and tucked away.

I knew about these slides, but never gave them much thought. When Helen died all her things were willed to her sister, Pauline, and when Pauline passed away she left all her family heirlooms to me. Since I also purchased Pauline's house, the boxes of slides remained on a top shelf in a spare bedroom, tucked out of sight and for the most part out of mind.

At one time I did look through a few of them and saw images I knew I needed to digitize. Unfortunately, I had a scanner that didn't do the images justice. They came out dark, grainy, and sometimes unrecognizable. After scanning a few images I accepted the fact I probably wouldn't ever get the clean image transfer I'd hoped for.

That was several years ago, and every once in a while I'd think to myself "I need to check out those slides again." I thought about this more after purchasing a new scanner, which promises crisper resolution and the potential to render the slides as high-quality digital images.

So on Sunday, while I was organizing other photos I planned to scan (or rescan at a higher resolution) I shuffled around some boxes and saw the slides, and thought "Let's see if I can do anything with these."

I sat down at 9am with a cup of coffee, a box of slides, my laptop and scanner. Fast forward to 8pm and I had five years and 375 images scanned, another two decades and countless images to go.

What's so great about Helen's photos is that they capture the everyday life of my family sixty years ago. There are photos of people laughing, people eating, people lounging around the house, the farm, the park. There are multiple generations - grandparents and great grandparents along with young children. There are vacations and birthday parties and farm sales. There's just about everything you would expect - and all of it is documented.

The boxes of Helen's slides start in 1953 and continue into the 1970s. The last box says on the top "Slides 1971- ?" I'm not sure yet where they end, or what precipitated their end. In my life time I never recalled Helen taking a single picture, but I knew her as the quiet, white-haired aunt whose Parkinson's tremors would have made it hard to be the prolific photographer she once was. Perhaps as children grew and older generations passed away Helen found less she wanted to photograph. Like so many family history questions, they're formed too late to find answers.

Fortunately, the subject and context of the slides are in no way ambiguous. Helen was meticulous, careful, and thoughtful. Scanning is tedious, as I can only scan four at a time and the high resolution needed to produce quality images takes a long time. The result, however, it totally worth the wait.

Thanks, Helen, for everything.

Helen's grandmother, Clara Finch, with Helen's nieces (Clara's great-granddaughters).
Yes, this is the Clara Finch, as in the former Mrs. Loren Finch so often mentioned on this blog.