Old School Photos... Like, REALLY Old School

I forgot when I started this little blog, that I was going to aim for 75% recipe posts, and fill the other 25% with craftyness, kitschyness, and bitchiness. Well, that percentage is currently way out of whack, and considering my life has been insanity lately and I've been living off of cheerios, salad, and tofurky brats, I haven't posted much lately because I forgot I could write about stuff other than food.

One of the things that I've been kept busy by in the last few weeks is looking through the one hundred years of photographs that my grandmother has collected in her life. I've looked through hundreds of photographs, slides and negatives in the last week, and that is not a hyperbole. I can now identify what my mother and my aunt looked like at any age in their childhood (though truthfully, that one is kind of easy considering I am the spitting image of my mother). I can also identify what my grandmother, my two great aunts, and my two great uncles looked like at any age, from three years old until they were well into their eighties.

I can tell you my mother and I look like my grandmothers mother, and I can tell you that my grandmother and my aunt take after the women in my grandmothers fathers family. This essentially means I look Norwegian and my grandmother looks English. I could tell you alot of things I have learned in the last week, but that's for another day. Right now I want to share some old school photographs, and when I say old school, I mean one-room school old. I mean walking 20 miles in the snow, uphill, both ways, old.

The following photos were taken by my great grandmother, on the open prairies of Alberta, Canada, using the Kodak Folding Pocket Camera she bought in approximately 1912 (which is still in working order and on a shelf in my living room). I just had the pictures printed from negatives that are almost 100 years ago, and I thrilled that these records of my grandmothers childhood have survived.

My Grandmother, on the Canadian prairie, in about 1919. She is the 2nd from the left.

Approx. 1915, probably while her father plowed wheat fields.

Approx 1916 in Three Hills, Alberta, with her younger brother Harold

Also 1916. My grandmother, my great uncle Harold, and my great great grand-mother Emma. Who, by the way, is who I will probably look like in 20 years...

Approx 1919. My grandmother, my great uncle Harold, and my great aunt Francis.