#TBT - Why You Need to Build a Legacy Program

That's my mother - 4th from the right

Click on either image to enlarge in the SCU Lightbox

My mother is the first one on the left.

by Skip Cohen

It's Throwback Thursday, my favorite day of the week. But today's share is also a reminder to capture the backstories better than I did!

The year is 1940, and the location is Mentor-on-the-Lake in Ohio. The photo above is glued to a black album page with the caption in white ink, "Legs on Parade." There's a second shot below it (shown on the right) with the caption, "We were 14 yrs old."
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While this is more information than most of the photographs in my mother's album, I'd love to know the backstories. And if this were captured today, there'd be nothing about the people, location, etc. What I'm missing isn't just the backstory but who's in the shot. If they were 14 in 1940, then they'd be 100 today!

Here's my point for this Throwback Thursday - don't let time win! Build a legacy program for your family...become the historian in the house. Find the time with older members of your family and sit down with those old albums and shoeboxes of photographs. Get the stories and the names so you can appreciate the legacy behind them.

And as you're building your current archive of contemporary images of your family and friends today, take the time for a little documentation. Just a sentence or two with each series of shots will be invaluable to your family after you're gone - give them the material for the backstories!

Remember today's shutter click is real estate on Memory Lane tomorrow.

​Happy Throwback Thursday!

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