It’s a dreadful name for a Web site, I admit it.

But the site itself is well-meaning and has a purpose – two of them, actually. First, it shares some old photographs of the family of Walter Alexander Norman and his wife, Jennie Lee Stokes Norman. The pictures were taken in a period roughly between 1935 and 1954, with a few outliers that may be a good bit older and one or two that may be more recent. ...All of which was before I was born, so the second purpose of this site is an experiment in group identification.
I recognize the few pictures of my father (if I stand back and squint a little) and some of my aunts and uncles, but many of the other subjects are mysteries. You may recognize people I have missed or misidentified, and if so, I would like to update the site with your revised identifications. I’ve numbered the photos to make identifying individuals easier, and there is an email link (chuck@clubnorman.com ) at the bottom of most of the pages that you can use to send corrections or confirmations.

In addition to documenting family history, these images have a past of their own. They arrived in the form of an old candy box full of negatives that my aunt Fern gave me in 1974. (The box still survives…that’s it on the home page.) There weren’t any prints in the box, just the negatives; and to understand the collection you have to realize that negatives were not held in high regard in our family, at least not in those days. But that isn’t to say that we were indifferent to photographs. Photographic prints were pictures, and pictures were wonderful things:  they were pieces of family history that got admired, and shared, and had stories told about them. Negatives…not so much.

So when I became interested in photography and it became obvious that I actually liked negatives and thought they were useful, it was an oddity. Not quite as bad as becoming a Moonie or joining the Shriners or something, but close. Whatever John and Fern thought about it, Fern saw me as the recipient of the negatives partly as a gift from a generous aunt, and partly by process of elimination. She knew in ways I would only later appreciate that the images represent
a considerable slice of her parents’ history. But because these weren’t really “the pictures,” there wasn’t a big fanfare when she gave them to me: her direct quote was, “Well, I asked John, and he said he didn’t want them!”

(Although John must have wanted them, at least at one time. That’s his handwriting on lid of the box. The label has gotten dirty over the years, but his India ink – which as a kid I thought so exotic in its stoppered bottle – remains unfaded over time. It was John’s collection to begin with.)

I wish I could say I was the perfect nephew and immediately printed everything in the box, but that wasn’t possible: the negatives are in many different formats – all antiquated, and were even in the 1970s. It would have required specialized optics to print them, and the sheer volume of images was beyond the capacity of a home darkroom. So the photos waited untouched for forty years as I moved around the country and settled in San Francisco, the box usually living in an office drawer, nearly forgotten.

Digital imaging changed everything of course, but less quickly than you might think for these large, odd-size negatives. Flatbed scanners have been widely available for a while now, but only in the last two or three years have the very high resolution scanners needed to scan negatives come down to reasonable prices. Even today you have to look carefully to find a device that will handle these old negatives in their original, full-frame format. Last year I found one that did, and I began the project of scanning them all, an undertaking that took longer to complete than you might imagine, and certainly longer than I had bargained for.

The result, however, was worth the time. Sorting through the box, the negatives had been cut into individual frames and were in no apparent order. Much of that randomness persists here; the photos that follow represent memories, not a strict timeline. Since the prints made from these negatives were undoubtedly handed down, a number of these images will already be familiar, at least to someone. But a few of them may have been lost or forgotten, and those few – along with the familiar ones – are seeing us here for the first time in seventy or eighty years.

A few housekeeping notes:

• There are links at the top and bottom of each page to help you get around. I hope these are pretty well self-explanatory. To view any individual photograph, you can click on the thumbnail image and a larger, more detailed version will fly out for closer examination. Hover over the left or right margin of this “flown out” image, and you’ll see arrows that let you scroll through all the pictures on that particular page. You can also use the left or right cursor keys on your keyboard to scroll through these flown-out images.


• Click the “Download” link below any individual image to receive an exact, digital copy of the original negative.
  A new tab will open in your browser, and you can  Right Click->Save image  to copy it to your hard drive. Fair warning: these files are very big – they range from 8MB to 30MB each, so depending on the speed of your Internet connection it can take a few minutes to download one. But as noted, you will then have a complete digital original for your records. (If you use Internet Explorer these downloaded images will look grainy. Once you save them to your drive they’ll be fine. Chrome users won’t have the problem, and this site is generally optimized for Chrome.)


• Where I have some idea of who the subjects are, I have included that information in the photo caption. In that context, “Probably” means I’m pretty sure I know, but I don’t want to offend anybody if I’m wrong. “Possibly” means I’m guessing. “Possibly(?)” means it’s a wild guess – but sometimes you get the right answer faster by guessing wrong than by staying confused. Confirmations and corrections are actively solicited, and if I did get anyone wrong, certainly no slight was intended.


• You’ll see that I use full names, and for women of my aunts’ generation, full maiden and married names. This approach smacks of pretense. However, I pretty much had to do it that way, given the how often names reappear. For example, I know perfectly well who I mean by “John,” and you probably do, too. But my niece, born in Texas and raised in Ohio, might well wonder if I mean my uncle John Norman; or his grandfather John Jackson Norman, or his great-grandfather John Norman (who should have been a Junior but never seemed to use the suffix); or his father, John Norman (who should have been a Senior, but didn’t use that, either). And then there’s the case of my cousin Jennie Lee, my aunt Jennie Lee, and my grandmother Jennie Lee. (Satterfield-Hendrix, Norman-Price, and Stokes-Norman, respectively.) Confused? Me too, sometimes…check the site’s You Are Here page to help sort us all out.

And finally, a closing thought: there is always the risk that a picture that looks perfectly innocent, even endearing, to me might trigger a bad memory or association for you. If so, please know that no offense is intended. Life is notoriously filled with false starts and wrong steps, and our family has had at least its fair share of those. But I hope you don’t find any of them here. With only a handful of exceptions, the people in these photos are singularly happy, at least for the instant the photo was taken.

Across the decades, they all smile out at us.