Linda, one of our repeat customers, found some family photos in a very unique way—inside of someone else’s kitchen wall. They went on quite a journey to get to her, and once she got them, they still had a ways to go!
Her mother’s family home was out west, and the family had long since sold it and scattered when the new owners decided it was time for some kitchen renovation. After knocking down a wall, they looked inside the wall to find, to their surprise, a stack of very old negatives. Luckily for Linda, the new owners decided to track down the original residents of the house and get those lost family photos back to them!
Then began the real work on their part. They started at their town hall, where they found records and information about previous owners of the house. A few generations had passed since Linda’s family had lived in the home, and her mother had gotten married and changed her name since her parents owned that house, but luckily she had some brothers who had kept the family name alive! The new owners tracked down one of Linda’s uncles and sent the stack of antique photos to him.
When Linda’s family got them back, they found that storing negatives in the kitchen wall left them open to all kinds of damage, but it seems that their string of good luck had not run out. Though some had faded or been damaged irrevocably, many of images were salvageable. They were taken using very old photographic equipment, and so they were not a standard size (well, not a standard size these days!) so we scanned the photos on a flatbed scanner to get the whole image, and then reversed the image. From there, some of the negatives just needed a little touching up. Some, however, will require extensive photo restoration.
Here are two of the negatives, and the images as restored at Play it Again Video:
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