Growing up the youngest of five children in the 1960s, there are very few photos of me. My parents were older when I was born and the novelty of having kids had worn out for them. I don’t think we even owned a camera, so the photos I have were usually shared by somebody else.

Being the youngest, I also had the disadvantage of not knowing any of my grandparents. They had either passed away before I was born or when I was young – leaving no memories of them for me. I had even less photos of them than I did of me.

Thankfully, one of my uncles took photos of my family whenever we would get together, but they were all in slide-form. Unless we visited him when he had the projector out, we never got to see those slides. Now that the years have gone by and so many of my relatives have passed, my brother was feeling nostalgic and said, “wouldn’t it be fun to see all of Uncle Harris’s slides?”

I love giving gifts that tug at people’s heart strings, so I put things into motion. I called my cousin to ask if he had my uncle’s slides and if I could see them. My cousin dug into the back of his closet for the box marked “slides.” I didn’t have immediate access to a projector, so I did the old-fashioned trick – holding them up to a light to look for people I recognized. It was a daunting task, but it was fun. I ended up pulling out a nice stack of meaningful slides of my immediate family as kids, plus a few of my cousins. After I finished looking at them, I brought them to FOREVER to be digitized.

After the digitization process was completed, it wasn’t my brother’s heart strings that were tugged on, but my own! Imagine my excitement when I found a slide that had both me at three-years-old (yellow dress on my mother’s lap, far right), along with my grandmother (on the sofa) on it! I felt like I had struck gold. The slide was taken in November, and she ended up passing the following March. I’m not sure if I am looking at her in the picture or the cake, but I would imagine both were sweet.

This photo was so special to me that I had it restored by FOREVER. Note how clear and bright the colors are!