There’s 160 years of family history in my photo album

There is something both surreal and important, I think, about saving an image of a person whose DNA is shared with you across the generations.

Bernard Salt’s grandfather as a 20-year-old cutting timber with a mate in Victoria in 1919.

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Around 20 years ago I started work on a personal project to organise every family photo I had in chronological order. My aim was to preserve and annotate pictures for the next generation. Soon I was contacting elderly uncles and aunties, and others – mostly distant cousins – to see what photographic treasures I might be able to copy.

I wish I’d started collecting these photos earlier in life, when my grandparents were alive. However, I now have over 500 such photos, many of which are from my own childhood. But there are also around 50 that have survived from previous generations.

Some relatives started passing onto me whole albums of old photos! There’s a feeling, I suspect, that old photos are important and deserve better than to be thrown away. Some photos have notations, identifying the people, written on the back. Other people can be identified by their approximate age and the name of the photo studio (for formal portraits), or from the provenance of the picture.

I have several photos of my great-great grandparents, born in the 1820s. There is something both surreal and important, I think, about saving an image of a person whose DNA is shared with you across the generations.

Bernard Salt’s great-great grandmother, born in 1830 in Tipperary, Ireland, photographed with her youngest daughter in 1879, Collingwood.

Had I not saved these photos, they and their stories of love and loss would have been lost to time. The people pictured are hardly nationally noteworthy for what they achieved in life, but to me, that is what makes the preservation of their images so utterly compelling. If we, humanity’s first digital generation, do not save and pass on what we have and know, then the connection to much of what went before is forever lost. The earliest photo I have is of one of my great-great grandmothers taken in Geelong in about 1864, when she was 30. I have another photo of a great-great grandfather taken, I think, in the 1870s in Warrnambool. These photos were passed on by chance at catchups that I organised with elderly relatives when I was in my early twenties.

Bernard Salt’s great-great grandmother, aged 30, in Geelong in about 1864.

Working out the subject and timing of photographs in my parents’ album was never a problem. My mother took black-and-white photos with her box brownie camera and meticulously wrote on the back who was who and the date and place of the picture. But placing each (now digital) photo into chronological order changes the perspective.

There is nothing more confronting, for example, than seeing a photo of your grandfather as a fit, healthy, handsome 20-year-old cutting timber with a mate, and fast-forwarding through 40 years to see what a lifetime of labouring outdoors without sunscreen, and smoking a packet of unfiltered cigarettes a day, does to the human body.

Suddenly it’s possible to see the journey of a family across time. There are glimpses of those who float into and out of the familial orbit (this includes the neighbourhood kid who just happened to be present at photo time). There are family friends whose kids mingled with you and your siblings at picnics and at outings.

In some ways the family photo album is a mine of information about the life and times of everyday people in the 20th century. Let’s not lose connection with that world.

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