Children & Phonographs, then & now

[Valecnik]

These children are no longer children but sometimes it's looking back on pictures like this, including children, other family members or friends that make the hobby all the more worthwhile.  ?

Edited May 15, 2020 by Valecnik
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[Auxetophone]

Somehow I get the feeling that "back then" children were fearful of going anywhere near the phonograph unless explicitly told to do so. My grandmother recalls never being allowed to go into the parlor as a child, where the phonograph would normally have resided. 

[Valecnik]

I remember my grandfather reminiscing with his sisters about the same thing.  As children they were never allowed in the parlor and if some tell tale evidence was found that someone had been there, somebody got the strap.

[RodPickett]

I have posted these before, elsewhere.  In the photograph with the Edison Fireside is my great-aunt, Jewell, and great-uncle (baby), Edwin, taken circa 1919 on the Pittman family farm in Davies County, Indiana.  At least they were allowed to handle the phonograph (in my collection) during the photo shoot.  The other photo is of their parents, my maternal great-grandparents, Jesse & Anna, in their vehicle.

[Fran604g]

Great photos! Am I the only one in the "boomer" age group that has children and grandchildren who don't put the same value upon photo-documentation of their family members, or life events? I sometimes feel as if I was born with a camera in my right hand, and I have been compiling family photos since my father taught me how to develop my own film (negatives and positives for slides) when I was about 8 or 9. My children and grandchildren take plenty of "pics" with their phones, but it seems after that, the images are more or less relegated to some obscure storage (cloud, usually) never to be permanently archived in a way that might not be lost to the future (as onto a PC hard drive, or other permanent storage device).

 

Best,

Fran

[phonogfp]

You're not the only one, Fran.  Our kids can't look at their images without some form of electricity.  I've predicted to my always-spellbound family that historians of the future will experience a void of period images beginning in the 21st century.  They won't be found in dresser drawers, boxes, or in albums.  Only on old cell phones (whose cheap components will have long since died) or possibly on portions of "the cloud" that haven't yet been arbitrarily deleted (remember "Photobucket?").  Bah - - young whippersnappers!

 

I only hope enough hard drives are saved by today's thoughtful youth to allow for an accurate overall pictorial survey to be developed of life in these times.

 

George P.

[Guest]

What saddens me is when I go to antique shops and there are boxes of old pictures, sometimes thousands of them, and I think that these are somebody's ancestors. Would they love to have them? It depends on their age. I think all of the electronic picture people of today will some day regret not having the physical image.