What I Look For and What I Find in Old Family Photos

My youngest sister emails to report that her new grandson — in our brother's assessment — looks exactly like our dead father looked 99 years ago. Henry, the 18-month-old grandson/ great-nephew, looks out from a recent holiday card. He has a direct gaze, deep-blue eyes under pale brows. If I didn't know his parents had Ireland in their origin stories, I would have guessed it.

By virtue of living nearest to our late parents, I have become the default storage repository of family history. In this role, I am tasked with confirming the family resemblance over the century and reporting back. With documentation.

In my house, photos reside in the dumping ground of the basement — we are in pre-iPhone eras here— sharing space with long-replaced coffee makers and crockpots (now called slow cookers), yards and yards of print fabrics of unknown provenance and dated athletic equipment used by kids who are now buying athletic equipment for their own kids, mostly for the same sports.

One set of shelves is the old photograph section. There are six floor-to-ceiling metal shelves with pictures stored in cracked albums, Barricini cookie tins, shoeboxes and cartons of those ubiquitous yellow Kodak envelopes with opportunities for the person who retrieved the photos from the drug store — that used to be the procedure — to enter the date and subject of the pictures. Not one envelope has benefit of that information.

The oldest of four siblings, I'm generally responsible and cooperative, and, as I have a few hours to spare, I agree. And coincidentally, Zadie Smith's observation "(I) was an oldest child, with all the shameful obliviousness that implies" from "Intimations," her 2020 pandemic book of essays, has been nagging for my full attention since I read it.

I am intrigued and already a little defensive; I own that my top-of-the-heap position in the birth lottery canted me toward hyper-awareness, alert to and conscious of too many impressions in my family. I start to wonder if I missed what I missed by "shameful obliviousness" or a lucky, early escape. Does every oldest child feel like she fled her childhood home just in time with only the mismatched, oddly chosen clothes on her back?

When I begin the basement excavation I discover that I have pictures from every family configuration I was born to or helped construct: a photo of my first husband in Montreal with his pals, standing in front of a Ukrainian sausage shop, one that would better belong with him or our son, though I feel lucky to have this decades-post-divorce glimpse.

There are four copies of a picture of him and his paternal grandfather posing with a large string of perch at a dock near a lake I can't place. It bothers me that I can't identify the lake. How much does one have to lose through divorce? People are one thing, bodies of water, another. But I'm reluctant to call this oblivion. The mind just gets crowded and some pieces of information drop away like lost earrings, freeing a little real estate for something with a greater claim to space.

There are pictures of the nephew — whose son may or may not look like our father — dressed as a devil for Halloween when he was a preschooler. I remember the costume. My friend Jeanne made it for her son and, as it was outgrown yearly, it made the rounds of kids, first in the neighborhood then more widely. We were good about recycling and reusing back then not because we thought we had a planet to save but because we didn't have much money. We did have a planet in peril but we didn't yet know it as crisis.

I discover an order: we just kept tossing newer photos on top of older ones. These are sedimentary layers and I am getting closer to earlier periods. I move the recent generations aside to expose the more fragile pictures.

After scenes of ten weddings (those are just the ones involving family members), graduations that range from pre-school through law school, many soccer and field hockey goals, beach scenes across several states, years of apple picking and Christmas pageants, bored looking teen-agers in headphones, happy-looking teenagers with car keys, the geological order reveals itself. The oldest pictures are edged by graceful, scalloped borders.

There in soft gray-black studio cardboard, smelling vaguely of mildew, is a picture of my father as a toddler, sepia-toned in a one-piece suit with six buttons and a wide collar suggesting a nautical theme. His eyes are large, wide apart. He seems an obedient child intent on pleasing someone — his mother or the studio photographer. 

I remember him — I am fully present to this memory — as a man who often looked away or into the distance, a dutiful and hard worker, a machinist second class when the war in the Pacific ended, a mind that turned away from books, a brain that designed and built anything. My father looks, I can't miss it, much like the one-year-old grandson/great-nephew my brother linked him to.

And immediately, out of order in these makeshift archives, are pictures of my siblings and me. The four of us hold each other easily, biggest to littlest stacked in footed pajamas on four steps of our home's one flight of stairs, trying to look like a circus trick. I remember those pajamas, their pale yellow cotton feel, nubby and softened over time. Our variously toothy grins on full display, we appear to be happy. 

I do not seem more oblivious than anyone else. Did we know even then that we would make it out alive, flawed, incomplete, intrigued enough about what lay beyond that flight of stairs to keep going and going and going?

Barbara Murphy is a writer whose poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including Green Mountains Review, Threepenny Review, Barrow Street, and New England Review. She is a recipient of a Vermont Arts Council Fellowship and twice-nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  Murphy served as a faculty member at the New England Young Writers Conference and is a board member of Sundog Poetry. A collection of her poems, Almost Too Much was published by Cervena Barva Press in 2015. Her second collection The Unfinished Family was released in Summer 2024. Her essays and reviews have been published in several venues including The New York Times, Plume Poetry, Full Grown People, and Green Mountains Review. She lives and writes in Burlington Vermont Read More