the corner office

Sandy flew up from KZN on Wednesday, and she spent the past few days with us. Sad as always seeing her off to the UK this evening. A quiet dinner with friends on Wednesday night, and a lazy few days chilling out at home (I didn't join the have-pounds-to-spend expeditions ;-)

While in Maritzburg with my aunt, Sandy had gone through my grandmother's photo collection, and she brought a number of them up to Joburg. These pictures span the 40s right through to the 80s and 90s - from my grandparents during WWII, to my mom, uncle and aunt as children, to the 'current' generation as children, teenagers and onwards.

The sad thing is that many of these pictures no longer have any context, and the stories behind them are probably lost. Sandy and I could remember and place a number of them, but others are just too old. There's a photo of my grandfather and grandmother when they must've been in their 20s or 30s, but we have no idea when or where it was taken. Another is the only picture of my great grandmother that I've ever seen - a photograph in a kitchen somewhere - and amazingly, on the kitchen table is a blue-and-white crockery jug, which Ronwen and I still have in our kitchen today! It had been in my grandparents' flat in 1997 when my grandfather passed away, and being the 'give all the old stuff to me' person, the jug came home with me. Was this old photo in my grandparents' kitchen, or my great-grandmother's kitchen? I always thought it was great that I had something from my grandparents; it'd be quite something if it was in some way a connection to a generation even further back.

One of the things Sandy and I have agreed to do, (and started doing this weekend), is scan all of these photographs so that we can all have a copy of them. I've had the idea for a while of putting them on a website so that everyone in our family has access to them. I'd love for us to accumulate as much 'story' behind all of these photos as we can, so that these memories aren't lost.