before & after

One of my current ongoing projects is scanning in hundreds (and hundreds) of old negatives of photographs from my great-grandfather, Lyle McBride. Last summer I worked quite a bit on gathering and imputing information on our family tree. After William was born and we moved to Missouri that got put on hold for a bit. But it awakened in me an interest in learning all the stories and bits of history that make up our family heritage. Having children has made me realize the importance of family heritage and culture and I wanted to gather some of that together so that I could incorporate it into our family and teach our kids where they came from. Those who have come before us have shaped and influenced who we are today.

Fortunately my Grandpa McBride (Lyle Jr.) is very active in researching our ancestral lines on that side of the family so I have benefited from his knowledge. And Mom happened to have all of these negatives stored away in a closet and requested that I scan them all into digital form. It is a pleasurable job. I love seeing my ancestors come to life and to get a glimpse of their happy moments and adventures.

I feel like I have a tie to my great grandparents because they seem to have been quite the adventurers. One big box of negatives was all from their trip out west to several state parks, including a couple that Clay and I have explored over the past few years. The most recent one was a pit stop to the Grand Canyon.

And lo and behold, here is my great grandmother, Hilfrie, also taking in the same spectacular view:

And we even took pictures of the same rocks (at slightly different angles)....


I still need to gather more information about the Dey and Hill sides of the family but I am loving tracking the Dodsons and McBrides back in time. More to come later.