A Mystery Revealed

   I have been working intensely on this box of Stephens pictures for almost a month now and had been looking at some of them for more than ten years but couldn't figure out who these two guys were. I still don't know who the one on the left is, but I have some theories. I have identified the dapper gentleman on the right who looks like he might be a movie star in a 1940's film. In fact, I thought that might be what this picture was for a while, a fan photo. It is a large photo, and very sharp, a studio photograph, I guess.

   I'll try to show you how I figured it out, since he didn't help me at all with his writing on the back of his pictures.  That's why I'm writing this, by the way, so you might realize you need to identify your pictures better. (Me too, my sister keeps telling me to write the names of the children, so she can review the genealogy and see who they are.) Someone who reads this might still have some paper pictures in a drawer somewhere. Don't think that anyone will know who the people are if you don't write their names clearly on the back.

   And internet pictures....  they're even worse. I've gotten email pictures that say, "This is me and so and so, at the beach." Well... that's nice,  but...... I've got 36 grandchildren and ten great grandchildren in all stages of development, and a picture today of you might look like your aunt, or cousin, or mother from ten years ago.  For example, look at these two pictures on the right. One is my daughter Suzy and the other is her daughter Whitney, but they look an awful lot alike. Sometimes I can tell from the coloring of the picture which is older, but these pictures are both pretty good, in fact I might guess that the picture on the left is older, but it isn't. Suzy is the mother, and she is on the right.

   Sometimes I can't find my keys from ten minutes ago, let alone identify a picture I copied from your email or Facebook page two weeks ago. There are so many pictures on my computers, that I sometimes can't find them immediately after I scan them. Sometimes my scanner is set to save a picture on a different disk than I thought it was, and it gets lost immediately, so I have to use the search system to find it, and even Macintosh computers take time, especially when you have ten hard drives...... I'll get back to this, but it's getting too late now, and I've got some stuff I need to do tomorrow.....