old ladies

[dragonlady7]

interview your oldest family member, ask them the names of the oldest people they knew, it's surprisingly informative!, anyway, dayjob camera store

via https://ift.tt/36jEPBm

So at the camera store one of the things I’ve been doing a lot of is the 8mm film transfers. And the thing about 8mm film is that it was popular from about 1950-1975, and I’ve seen reels as old as 1942 and as new as the late 80s. (Oh, this one’s dated 1939! That can’t be right though, the reel inside has clearly got 50s fashions and it’s in color. Someone switched containers, sometime.) The girl who was doing them while I wasn’t here is not nearly as interested in history as I am, but I’m a little prejudiced I think because my own mother sent me her 8mm reels and we did them, and so the fact that basically every reel looks the same means that I’m seeing my mother’s childhood.

(They do all look the same, for the most part– it’s 1963, here comes Grandma with the turkey, a jovial balding man in a white dress shirt is going to carve it while a bunch of generic-looking white kids sit around the table, the house has wood-paneled walls, there’s an old car, probably an old man has a pipe. There are exceptions– sometimes the ladies have beehive hairstyles, sometimes there are plaid bellbottoms– but only very, very rarely are there any people of color. I love those orders.)

And the thing that’s really getting me at the moment– I’m doing an undated reel at the moment, it was Thanksgiving and then it was Christmas, a lot of people in bathrobes were delightedly watching children tear paper, and then it was evening and they were in party dresses on the couch with cordial glasses– is the old ladies. Specifically the old ladies, and I’m not sure why.

The old woman there patiently holding the turkey while the slightly younger woman dumps stuffing into it– she’s in a calico apron with frills on the shoulders that covers her whole dress except the sleeves, her hair is carefully styled, she is smiling indulgently– it’s sometime in the early 50s, from the look of the party dresses. She’s in her 60s. She was born in the 1890s. She’s surely dead now, but what things her life included! I think of my own grandmother matter-of-factly describing her chores as a child, how things worked without electricity, the way she could type 110 wpm but never was great at double-clicking a mouse without dragging it.

I don’t know why it’s the women so specifically, maybe because women’s fashions change so much more obviously than men’s in this time period, and in the later reels I can see my own childhood, I can see things that now are hilariously dated but that were perfectly normal when I was a child. The brown checkered linoleum floor of my kitchen, where I learned to crawl, that my parents installed new in 1978, that we ripped out in 1991 because it was so old and grungy.

So I just think about that, and think about how funny we’ll all look in 20 years, and I don’t have a punctuation for this, I’m just on my third reel of this order and I want one of those calico aprons that go all the way around.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

*contemplates*

My oldest family member on my dad's side is my dad, whom I don't want to talk to, but the oldest on my mom's side is Aunt Hyacinth, so I could go talk to her...

[dragonlady7]

my mom does a lot of geneaology and she says that's like. the #1 thing she always recommends.
Go talk to the oldest member of your family you can stand, LOL. Ask them what they know about family history. Ask them for names. Because a lot of time, you only know someone as "uncle Tony" and it turns out his name was really something else entirely, and he wasn't really an uncle he was a second cousin, and there's a whole fascinating story of why.
But if you have real names you can find censuses, immigration paperwork, church database records, grave sites. You can find out so much stuff you never would have known otherwise. It's so good to know.

[dragonlady7]

(and like. even if you don't do anything with the information, the fact that you did it means that in 30 years when a niece comes to you and asks you can say, ah, my great-aunt's long dead but a few decades ago I asked her and she gave me all these names your niece would never have found out otherwise!)

[krait]

Can you post a photo of the apron?

My mother makes aprons; she probably has a pattern for it!

[dragonlady7]

ah i just put some pictures in a new entry, which won't crosspost correctly. lol i was like "someone asked me for a photo" and couldn't figure out who, and then i'd left myself this tab open.
I know exactly what kind of apron it is, I have a Pinterest board from years ago where I was sort of storyboarding myself an apron like this, and I cannot access my own pinterest because the fucking page won't load to let me request a new password, so. I know exactly what I'm describing and cannot find the image of it, what a pain in the fucking ass. LOL!