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When I was sifting through my dad's residence I found many things outside of any logical context. One strange discovery was a batch of 19th century tintypes in the midst of a box of newspapers from the 21st century. This was perhaps the most sobering of all the discoveries. It reinforced my understanding that I really was mining through bedrock in hopes of finding veins of precious minerals.
This week I re-encountered the tintypes in one of the boxes I had brought home. My first action was to plop each one of them on the scanner (which I also retrieved from my dad's office), commit them into the code repository on the RAID 0 mirror, publish them on the web, and alert all my relatives via e-mail.
Except for the one tintype of my parents (done by a touristy revival shop in the 1950s) nobody else recognized any of the subjects of the tintypes. Based on the technology, the physical characteristics of the metal, and other photographs I'm pretty sure that I have images of three of my great-grandparents when they were kids, and one of my paternal great-great-grandparents (yeah, probably the guy who was one of three indicted for the murder of a stranger).
The image I think is my great grandmother as a child is best of all, mostly because of her expression. She is posed sitting with one leg down and one across. In her lap might be a purse, or maybe a doll; the condition of the emulsion on all of these makes it hard to be sure. But her eyes are wide open revealing all of the light-colored irises. It almost looks as if she just saw something explode right in front of her face.
Of course.
This week I re-encountered the tintypes in one of the boxes I had brought home. My first action was to plop each one of them on the scanner (which I also retrieved from my dad's office), commit them into the code repository on the RAID 0 mirror, publish them on the web, and alert all my relatives via e-mail.
Except for the one tintype of my parents (done by a touristy revival shop in the 1950s) nobody else recognized any of the subjects of the tintypes. Based on the technology, the physical characteristics of the metal, and other photographs I'm pretty sure that I have images of three of my great-grandparents when they were kids, and one of my paternal great-great-grandparents (yeah, probably the guy who was one of three indicted for the murder of a stranger).
The image I think is my great grandmother as a child is best of all, mostly because of her expression. She is posed sitting with one leg down and one across. In her lap might be a purse, or maybe a doll; the condition of the emulsion on all of these makes it hard to be sure. But her eyes are wide open revealing all of the light-colored irises. It almost looks as if she just saw something explode right in front of her face.
Of course.
