Family Photo Friday, err, Monday

The sorting project is still going on with our photos. My first few categories are easy: my family, Sharon's family, John & Don, and landscape/flowers.  It's the hodgepodge of old photos (and finding a good storage/scanning/sorting system) that is intimidating. Right now they're going into a pile to be resorted against all "only touch it once" advice of organizing/decluttering. 

Many most are not labeled in any way so I'm leaning toward sorting by era/life event (old farm, time in Superior) but every system I think of creates more outliers than anything.  Any other method would destroy "original order" that might give me clues but based on the mixes of photo sizes, styles, locations etc. I'm certain any useful clues were lost some time ago.  The most important information I hope to glean are the names from the backs of the photos to fill in some gaps in the extended family tree.  Okay, maybe the most important thing I hope to find are embarassing pictures of my dad* :-) 

And speaking of the extended family tree - they throw a big kink in the system as it appears grandma inherited many of their photo collections which means we have 5+ copies of certain photos that were sent to all the families.  There's a cute set of twins in the extended family (not my dad and uncle, though they're cute as well*) for whom we have seemingly hundreds of photos that were sent to my grandma, great grandma, and great aunts and uncles.  Part of the overwhelmingness of these photos is the fact that I know there are tons of duplicates within the old photos but until I get them in the same section of the pile I feel like I keep going through the same photos.  The plus side of the duplicates however is the hope that at least one somewhere along the line got labeled. 

In the meantime, (and before I get into the embarrassing progression of awkward photos of Matt and I holding kittens) here are just a few more of me and Uncle Matt being kinda cute:

Uncle Matt:

 

Daddy (every once in a while I come across an errant picture or something in our stuff and enjoy scanning them in.  His family pictures don't need the "work" that ours do however):

  

Matthew:

 

 Me and my favorite quilt:

Catherine all pretty in pink:

 

 And finally Dad teaching us the importance of Pong at an early age:

* I have no idea what these two are doing in this picture, but due to the awesomeness of their hair, it might be the only picture I've seen where Dad and Don look anything like twins: