Can you believe that it’s already been a year?! What’s that, you ask? Why, it’s the Lawton and Allied Families Reunion.
We met at the Presbyterian Church in Estill, SC, on Friday evening for the welcome dinner and photo presentation. There were approximately 30 people there, many that we had met last year, and a few new faces.
The photo presentation was about 230 photos taken from approximately 1954 until 2000. The photographer was fellow named Dwight Moore who is now deceased. He left behind thousands of negatives, each set in an envelope with typewritten headings as to the date, the subject, the place taken, and incidental information, like whose truck was in the background and how many caught fish were on the string. You get the idea.
You’re probably wondering how Dwight’s photos came to be presented. He left them to a fellow photographer, a young man in his 40’s, right there in Garnett, who prepared a powerpoint presentation which first involved having the negatives scanned by a lab. It was an incredible meld of past and present. The crowd was charmed, and many folks could call out the names of people on photos.
I noticed that there were no pictures of Dwight’s wife and children, and when I got home I did a little ancestry stalking. I started a family tree for Dwight on ancestry.com, and he never married.
Thank you, Dwight, for an amazing gift to the future. A half-century of photos of small town life saved forever. Sleep well, my friend.
June 2, 2012 at 10:58 pm |
Thank you for sharing the experience. That would be a priceless set of photographs. I’m sure they’re in good hands. I’ll bet as a genealogist you found them exciting and Sugar would have too.
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June 3, 2012 at 4:35 pm |
The amazing thing is that these negatives were not stored in special conditions. They were in a shed that didn’t have heating or cooling, and the span of storage was approximately 50 years. That’s *FIFTY*. Wow. Just wow.
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July 11, 2012 at 11:08 am |
Thanks for having me there, and I am sure glad that everyone enjoyed the pics. I sure enjoyed showing them!!! All of the pics will be up soon at http://www.hamptoncountyhistory.com. I am working on the site now as well as getting more of Dwight’s images scanned to add there too.
Sincerely,
Jeff Hunt
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July 11, 2012 at 6:52 pm |
Jeff, I will be stalking your photos soon. Thank you for sharing! Dwight’s photos make me want to take more photos. He’d be a heck-of-a-blogger.
And to my blog readers: See?! I don’t just make this stuff up.
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