When I was a little girl, one of my favorite pastimes was looking through my mom’s photo albums. She had two big ones and one small one, each filled with a variety of mostly black and white photographs. One the edge of each photo, the date was printed by the company who had developed the film.

Each picture had been put into the book by my mom with these little, black, sticky triangle pieces that fit over each corner of the photograph. The negative had been carefully taped to the back of the photo, and underneath each picture, my mom had used white ink on the black pages to tell who was in every photograph.

As a little girl, I can remember spending hours poring over those albums. Several of the photos were taken long before I was born, but that didn’t matter. The faces that looked back at me from the pages of those photo albums were all familiar, since I had looked at them so many times. One of my favorite memories is when Mom and I would sit down with those albums, and I could ask her questions about the people in the photos and the events that were occurring when the picture was snapped.