Silver Heartbeats: "Scenery and Small Trips" Scans (July 2025)

I started archiving and restoring the photographic memories of my grandparents starting in 2018 while my late Grandma Pat was in hospice. I was very fortunate to be able to share what was in her memory box, printed some restored photographs that she could have in her room, and was able to receive some context from her while she was still alive.

Since then, work on this project has been very sporadic. I stopped working on it in 2021 when we moved to our new house and began to dislike how I had organized everything. Since I have waaayyy too many hobbies, it was also easy for this project to fall by the wayside. I knew this was a massive undertaking, but it is a labor of love that I hope to continue to work on as long as I am able.

In early 2023, I received another box of memories from my uncle that included several boxes of slide film. At the time, I did not have a scanner so I was only able to view the images from a slide viewer.

It is finally time to dive back into this project, and now that I have a film scanner I figured these slides would be a good place to start. My goal is to scan a batch every couple-of-weeks to once-a-month and share favorites on my blog and on Instagram. I will also work to find a good place to share the entire archive with immediate family members.

The first set I am starting with is a box labeled “Scenery & Small Trips.” Most images appear to be from the mid-to-late 1950’s on Kodachrome 135 Color Slide Film. Grandma Pat did indeed label most of these providing when and where the photographs are from. However, some did not, and I wanted to share some of those in this entry as we get started.

Some labels were hilarious exclamations such as “Mmmm!” and “Ugh!”, but of course the first slide I scanned was one labeled “Strip Poker.” Below is an assortment of the slides in this box that caught my eye as I casually went through them for the first time.