Seeing My Childhood Through My Sister’s Eyes

A month ago, I traveled to New Jersey to help clean out my niece’s apartment. As part of the process, I offered to take her albums of photos home with me, digitize them and return the originals along with a digital collection she could have and share.

I thought I knew what I was bringing home: boxes of family photographs that needed to be sorted, scanned and protected. But tucked among my niece’s albums were many albums that had belonged to my older sister, who died in 2012. Suddenly, this wasn’t just another photo project.

As I began removing and preparing the photographs for scanning, I realized I wasn’t simply looking at old pictures. I was reliving parts of my childhood through my sister’s eyes. She had chosen these photographs. She had decided which moments were important enough to save and which images belonged beside one another on a page.

There were people, places, celebrations, hairstyles, and details I hadn’t thought about in decades. Some memories came rushing back. Others surprised me because I remembered the same time in our lives differently.

Perhaps most powerful was seeing the phases of our relationship unfold on those pages. Sisters don’t have one relationship for a lifetime. We were children together, then teenagers, then young adults building separate lives. We became working women and mothers, and our relationship changed along with us.

Our relationship, like many between sisters, was complicated. There were periods of closeness and others when we struggled to understand each other or the choices we made. Looking through her photographs years later allowed me to revisit those different chapters from a new perspective. I found myself remembering not only who she was at each stage, but who I was then, too. There was something unexpectedly cathartic about seeing our lives unfold again, with the benefit of time and distance.

There were moments when the process was powerfully emotional. Grief has a way of freezing someone at the point when we lost them. These albums did the opposite.

Page after page, my sister was changing. She was young again. She was laughing. She was becoming a mother. She was surrounded by people she loved. I wasn’t just remembering the sister I lost in 2012. For a little while, I was remembering the lifetime we had before then.

It also made me think differently about the albums and boxes of photographs sitting in our homes. We often see them as projects we need to “get to someday.” But an album can be much more than a collection of pictures. The person who created it was making choices, even if they didn’t realize it at the time.

What they saved, how they arranged it and sometimes what they wrote beside a photograph can give us a glimpse of a story through their eyes. That’s something worth considering before we pull every photograph out, scan it and reorganize everything. Sometimes the original album itself is part of the story.

I started this project because I wanted to preserve my niece’s family photographs for her. I didn’t expect those photographs to give something back to me. They gave me another visit with my sister, another look at my childhood and a perspective on our relationship I hadn’t experienced before.

If you have an old family album, don’t wait until you have time to organize it. Just sit down and turn the pages. Look at who took the pictures, who saved them and what they chose to remember. You may discover that you’re not simply looking at your family’s past. You’re seeing it through the eyes of someone you love.

Rhoda Gordon is the owner of Sunflower Photo Solutions. sunflowerphotosolutions.com or digyourphotos.com