Sugar has a closet with odd, assorted items in it, all pertaining to his family. It’s like a little time capsule.
He knew that he had some photos of when his parents would go to Edisto Island and stay with Chalmers and Faith Murray. He’s not really sure how those four met up, and none of the photos actually had Chalmers in them. He was a busy fellow. Google him – you’ll see. He was an attorney, an author, a writer, and editor, a speaker.
So the time machine was activated, and Sugar found photos of Edisto, but that wasn’t all. He found photos of his mother as a little child, photos of his mother’s mother, and other family members, then he found a jaw-dropper.
*****
We went on a little history tour earlier this year in March. He took some photos of the William Starr Basinger family to a local Staples to be copied so that he could present them to the historical society in Lumpkin County, Georgia. You might remember reading about our follow-up visit in the historical society’s newsletter. Good times.
He was pretty sure that he got the family photo from another cousin in Savannah, until he pulled out the original from the closet box, and O MY. There is handwriting on the back that identifies the people.
But wait for it. There’s ANOTHER photo of the same family with the parents and the children, also all identified.
Y’all, please. Go get those photos out of the closet and scan them. NOW.
Dahlonega, Ga.
The Basinger family
Leslie, Tom, Auntie, Grandma
Walter, Mamma, Papa,
Maggie, Ate’
J. N. Wilson, Savannah, Ga., 1885
The Basingers
Garnett, Mag, Will
Leslie, Maj. Basinger,
Walter, Mrs. Basinger,
Tom
(I used an automatic adjustment feature on the computer program to alter the lightness/darkness of the back of the 2nd photo. It made the handwriting more distinct, but also changed the color.)
Tags: Family History, Georgia, History, Margaret Roane Garnett, Mary Leslie Basinger Lawton, Old Pictures, Savannah, William Starr Basinger
Ruthrawls's Blog 
October 22, 2014 at 1:26 am |
I would recommend using Pixlr.com to retouch the photos. It’s free and isn’t installed on your computer. I use it. If you first balance the photo using brightness and contrast it helps a lot even for things like the back. You can then use one of the filters called old photo which will help as most of the photos were originally gray scale (black and white). Don’t know if that helps you any. I’ve done quite a few of my photos that way and it improved their appearance without losing the detail.
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October 22, 2014 at 8:33 am |
Aquila, I saw what you did for Pierre on “Our Ancestors” when you retouched one of his old photos. This helps a lot. Thank you so much! I’m not familiar with Pixlr.com.
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October 23, 2014 at 11:51 pm |
It’s an easy program to use. You can even undo several things so you don’t have to worry if you do something and don’t like it you can change it. Make sure when you save the image to push the quality to 100 – the default it 80 and that’s not good enough, the better quality makes a difference. Take and image and just play with it, the program does some interesting things. If you use a copy of an image you won’t lose the original. If you want to email a few images to me I’ll be happy to do them for you and document what I did so you can try and repeat the process.
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November 1, 2014 at 8:18 pm |
Aquila, I emailed a photo to you so you can work your magic. 🙂
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