Family Photographer | Golden, Colorado

Family photos. I know I can get preachy when it comes to this subject. I want to tell you a story though. I am the youngest of six kids so my mom was busy - very busy. I knew some basics of her childhood, but not full stories. Both of her parents were gone before I was born, so I didn’t have the advantage of hearing the stories from them. I knew she grew up in Iowa and Nebraska and maybe at some point lived in Missouri. I knew my grandfather was a Danish Lutheran Minister and also farmed. I knew she grew up without much and considered it a treat when she was allowed to get a scoop of ice cream. She cherishes her ice cream to this day!

That was pretty much it though. I didn’t know details and stories. Then sometime in the early 2000’s she was contacted by a publisher letting her know that a relative of a photographer, Pete Wettach, who had been deceased for 20 some years, had boxes of negatives in their basement. These negatives had sat there for decades, never being printed. The publisher was putting together a book and some of the found photos were of my mother and her family on one of the farms they had lived on when she was a child.

These photos were such a wonderful gift to all of us. Not only were we given a peek into where my mother had spent some of her childhood, they spurred her memories and stories were told. We learned about the tiny little house they lived in (the photo of the woman in front of a shack), and the joy they found in the animals and the land. We heard about their move to Missouri, but my grandmother didn’t like it there and wanted to come back north. I learned about the house from these images. There was a bed on each side of this shack with the cooking stove in the middle to keep them warm. Eventually they added a small trailer that the kids slept in while her parents stayed in the main part of the home.

These images are such a treasure for our whole family and it is hard for me to believe they almost went undiscovered. It isn’t unlike our digital negatives today. How many times have you paid for a photoshoot, or taken photos of your own, only to have them sit on your hard drive or on Instagram? How will your children’s children find those photos? Most likely, if you don’t print them, they will just be lost forever. It isn’t enough to take the photos. You must print them. Give yourself and your future children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren the gift of your memories.