The first time I saw this picture of my grandmother, Gwen, my grandfather looked at me with a grin on his face and said, “Isn’t she sexy?” His comment made me laugh, but it also helped me understand his constant love and admiration for her.
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I love this snapshot of her because it was taken at the beginning of their love story. My grandfather took the photo in May of 1955, shortly after they were engaged. They met in Fort Story, Virginia and quickly fell in love, getting engaged after only two weeks knowing each other.
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My grandmother was a quiet, beautiful, and artistic woman who loved her family. She was always classy, but also spunky! And people always told her she looked a bit like Sophia Loren. My grandfather still says she looked like Sophia Loren, but adds that she was even more beautiful!
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For the last year, I have been working on an important project for my grandfather. Whenever I would visit him growing up, he would find any opportunity to pull out his old slide projector and share pictures of him, my grandmother, and their four children.
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He loved taking pictures and had boxes and boxes of slides. As a child, I often got bored looking at outdated pictures. But as I got older, I started to realize the significance and importance of these images, especially after my grandmother passed away in 2013. I started to panic. What if these images were lost, damaged, or ruined? My grandfather has his entire life story on those slides. Not only did I want to preserve them, I wanted them accessible for his entire family.
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So, I told my grandpa I wanted to help him. I wanted his images to last forever and I wanted him to be able to share them with his children and grandchildren. Together we picked out a scanner, he brought his boxes of slides down from Wyoming and I started scanning. I’ve now scanned over a thousand (with many more to come!) and am beginning to repair and and upload the images so my family can have them, too. I’m so grateful my grandfather recorded his family’s life with his camera because their story is a story worth sharing.
~shared by @thecrandallfilmproject