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Over the Back Fence By HANK HENRY Put dates and names on all those snapshots This is a plea to everyone who collects family snapshots to do two things: Write on the back of each snapshot the names of those pictured and note the date when the picture was taken. Most people think, "Oh, everybody knows Uncle Joe." That may be true at the time the photo is taken, but if Uncle Joe is left unidentified he's probably destined to remain that way. Nora went through that problem when her friend Kristie decided to catalog all of the old family pictures to give to her children. Nora tried to help her with identifying the people in the picture. She would hold up a picture and say, "And who is this?" Kristie would say, "That looks a little like cousin George, but look at that side view of the nose. It seems to be bigger than I remember it." So the photo was put in the possible file. I've found it is also important to mark on the back the date when the picture was taken. If you can't remember the exact date, just write the year. Any clue will help. One of the good things about looking at old pictures is that you may find some pleasant surprises. Our daughter-in-law was looking at some 1930s photos when she saw herself among a group of young children at a swimming pool. How could that be? She then realized that the first-grader in the crowd was actually her mother. She had never thought that she looked much like her mother, but here was proof that at age 6 mother and daughter looked almost identical. The first time I remember being photographed was when our family was visiting our father's sister and her two young sons. An itinerant photographer rang the front doorbell. He proudly showed us his little wagon that was drawn by a goat. Our aunt had been widowed a short time before, and our parents were suffering the economic woes of 1929, so neither family could afford to spend money for what was really a frill. All four of us boys must have been good persuaders, or perhaps we threw temper tantrums, but somehow we got our way. The photographer brought the results back the next day. These were two standard-size prints that probably cost a whole dime each for developing and printing. Our families probably were charged a dollar or two for each one, which was a healthy profit margin for the entrepreneur. He could make good money on as few as 10 sales a day. Nora's mother had a cedar chest full of photographs, none of which were marked. She lived into her 70s and had moved away from where she was born, so there was no one left to identify the people in those childhood pictures. After the war, Nora's aunt Mary operated a portrait studio in Klamath Falls for more than a decade. Her shop was located in the basement of a department store, and Nora did odd jobs there while in high school. She says that her aunt, who did the darkroom work, was able to glance at a negative in the dim darkroom and not only could identify the person in the portrait, but could supply a lot of personal details as well. If you have visited antique stores lately, you will have noticed how popular old mounted photos have become. They have stacks of them to sell. Among the best sellers are babies and weddings. Ask the proprietor for the name of the person in the frame and you'll probably be met with indifference. These old photos were precious memories for somebody. Now they sell in the $10 range, even though the people are unidentified. While I was finishing work on this column, Nora began rummaging through a large box full of snapshots that had been in the closet of my home office. She found that not one of the hundreds of our pictures there had been properly identified as to subject and date. So, having preached the sermon, you know what I will be doing for the next few weekends. Hope you do the same. (Hank Henry is a retired Jackson County commissioner and a former radio and television announcer. Call him at 772-9055.) Prime Times front page Mail Tribune front page Copyright � The Mail Tribune 2000, Medford, Oregon USA