He is Somebody's Somebody

Sometimes at household auctions you find things that make you pause. In this case at a Norway, Iowa sale last weekend there was this old photo of a somebody. No information on the photo's front or back as to who this person was and no one in the auction crowd knew either. Besides having a bad hair day, this guy was somebody to someone at one time. I'm sure the cost of the photo sitting was high at the time and the elaborate frame indicated that this was something cherished by a family. But as generations change and the stories become lost to time, eventually the identity of this person fads.

In today's digital photography world we too face this same issue. Outside of identifying the subject and date in the file name, there is not much else to positively identify our subjects. Preserve your digital images with file tags or other means. Otherwise in a hundred years someone looking at a digital copy of your Uncle Ed will not have a clue as to who that is in the image. Know that.