Labeling Photographs: Memory and Mourning

Have you ever wondered why some of your inherited family photographs are impeccably labelled, and others are unfortunate blank canvases?

My maternal grandfather recently passed away, and I inherited a handful of photographs. Not the real old kind, just a few pictures from my parents' wedding through approximately my 8th grade graduation. Almost all were unlabeled, and the ones my grandmother had labeled were vague or incomplete. "Gail's wedding" or "July 16, 1997."

Luckily, I was able to identify the people and places in almost all of them, and could give at least an educated guess as to approximate dates. So when I got home from my mom's house the other night, I set right to labeling the pictures.

I found myself being more specific than usual, with places in particular. I realized that the impending sale of my grandparents' home, the home where my mother grew up and where my cousins and I spent so much of our childhood, was driving me. Scribbling the street address, over and over, on the backs of 4x6 prints, somehow made me feel like I was doing my part to keep the memory of Grandma and Grandpa's house alive. (I was there only days earlier. The race to "keep memories alive" can be premature or even irrational.)

But this influenced my labeling throughout the collection. I added street addresses to pictures taken in my current house, in my parents' house, anywhere I recognized. I was aiming for consistency, yes, but I was also imagining a future where we've moved out of the home we love and have only pictures to remember it by. A future where I've passed away and my children struggle to remember the address of the apartment in NYC where we spent the first years of our marriage. Or where my kids - who will only ever know the apartment my in-laws downsized to - can't picture them living in the big house in the suburbs where my husband spent his happy childhood. Will addresses on the back of photographs change any of that? Not by much. They can't bring back a grandfather, unsell a house, or give my son any real memories of the apartment where he spent the first 10 weeks of his life. But they can make me feel like I tried.

I wonder what my kids, my descendants, the strangers who find my albums in a thrift store will think when they see how well-labelled some - but not all - of my pictures are. I can't imagine that they will even begin to follow my thought processes.

Have you ever though about what motivated the people creating the records you use?

Newspaper Research: 249 Clermont Avenue

Over the summer, I ordered my great-grandparents' 1923 marriage license, and saw that my great-grandfather, John O'Hara gave his address as 249 Clermont Avenue, an address I was theretofore unfamiliar with.

1923, O'Hara-Quinn marriage license

Brooklyn Daily Standard Union, 15 Sept. 1924

This week I was searching the Brooklyn Daily Standard Union on Fulton History, and found an ad from the next year, offering a furnished apartment to let at 249 Clermont Ave. This was not something I had ever thought of using newspaper research for, but I realized that it gives a wonderful picture of what the building would have been like at the approximate time that John O'Hara was living there. (One thing that's not entirely clear to me at the moment is whether the entire family was living there, or whether 27-year-old John had moved out and was living on his own. For context: In 1920, 23-year-old John was living with his parents at 303 Vanderbilt Ave; in 1925, his 26-year-old brother Eugene W. O'Hara was living with their parents at 509 6th St. The pattern does seem to be living at home as a young adult, up until marriage, but I can't be sure that it holds universally.)

The 15 September 1924 ad reads "249 CLERMONT AVE., near DeKalb: large, small rooms, kitchenette; phone; electric."

Since not every building in the city would have had electricity, much less phones, in the early 1920s, this is very enlightening! I suspect that the building was in a nice area and had better amenities than some. Now I'm hoping that the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and the Brooklyn Daily Standard Union contain similar references to other apartment buildings that my family lived in, which would be a great resource for establishing some information about the lifestyle and socioeconomic status of various families.