One of the obsessions I share with my mother-in-law, Nancy, is photos. (Another is apostrophe abuse, but we'll save that for another day.)

On my end, I need to confess to at least 35,000 photos in my Google Photos account. And while some of these are analog photos that I've digitized, most were born digital. On top of these, we have a somewhat chronological multi-shoebox collection of pictures from before 2008. So there's a lot.

Nancy always had a camera ready, organizing the participants for any particular occasion into various permutations and combinations. She would always assume an unusual photo-taking crouch that my arthritic knees no longer allow me to imitate.

But I didn't give a lot of thought to where all those pictures wound up. The depth of the obsession on Nancy's end wasn't apparent until we emptied Nancy and Price's home of 50+ years. We found thousands and thousands of pictures, often with duplicates, in an envelope from someone like Seattle Film Works.

But that's not all. On top of that, Nancy's mother - and likely her grandmother - were apparently also photo-obsessed. And Nancy had saved all of THOSE pictures from when she cleared out her parents' home in the 1950s. They all wound up in the house mentioned above. Everywhere. In just about every nook and cranny, often in a bag, with a note written on the bag describing its contents. Except usually, the writing was in shorthand.

We discovered a locked chest hidden far away in a corner of the attic during the clearing-out process. As we lugged this chest down the rickety attic ladder and began a search for a crowbar, we fantasized about the long-lost gold bonds and shares from an infant IBM (the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company) that we would find. We carefully pried the lid open to discover…more photos.

All of these are gold mines for a budding family historian like myself. And even though Nancy was better than most at jotting down who was in the pictures, most sit on the edge of becoming lost and forgotten. The collective knowledge that could identify many of these pictures is quickly disappearing.

I’ve wanted to write something about Mary Glenn’s side of the family for a long time -- won’t she be excited to hear about THAT! -- but I have struggled with a starting place. Unlike my family, there is just so much. And as I mentioned last year, I am also a world-class procrastinator.

Last year, I decided that I needed to do SOMETHING to force my retired ass to be a bit more productive. As a New Year's Resolution, I decided to write a post every week about something and see if it turned into anything. By the end of the year, I had devised the idea for 70ish: Lessons Learned, a 70th birthday present for myself.

My treasure trove of Southwest Virginia pictures and my preservationist worry that nobody in the next generation will know what they are all about, thereby making moot my sweet mother-in-law's careful archival work, gave me an idea. It's a little late for a New Year's Resolution, so maybe consider it an Easter Resolution.

Resolution: I will take one of Nancy's older pictures weekly and write about it. That's it. And if it leads to something, great. If not, I've done the digital equivalent of writing on the back of the picture for someone down the line to ponder.

So here goes.

Back of the picture info: Caleb Sowers (1840-1927), Mary Glenn’s great grandfather, is in the lower left of the picture. The fifer next to him is Samuel Palmer. The photo was probably taken between 1905 and 1910 at a reunion of the 24th Virginia Infantry, Company A. The picture was taken on the front steps of the Roanoke Elks Club.

At some point, Nancy clipped this picture from a newspaper, and I digitized it. The metadata I captured at the time was not terribly helpful – shame on me. The picture was "taken" by an Olympus E-500 camera, at f-stop 5.4 at 1/80 shutter speed, with ISO100 "film" on September 2, 2007, at 1:55 in the afternoon. That makes sense because, at best, my cell phone would have taken pictures at a resolution of 320 x 480 pixels, so I likely would have used my digital SLR to take a picture of the image.

From past family history research, I know that Nancy’s father Caleb Sowers was a drummer the 24 Virginia Infantry, Company A, known as the Floyd Riflemen. His Civil War experience was quite significant – he enlisted in 1861 and served until he was captured at Five Forks in the last two weeks of the war. He was in Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg and active in Confederate reunions.

I did a Newspapers.com search of reunions and discovered an article from July 5, 1949, which notes that a picture had been posted four days earlier of an unidentified "group of Confederate veterans on the steps of the Roanoke Elks Club" and that the article "has resulted in the identification of some of the old timers," including Caleb.

Back of the picture info: Caleb Sowers (1840-1927), Mary Glenn’s great grandfather, is in the lower left of the picture. The fifer next to him is Samuel Palmer. The photo was probably taken between 1905 and 1910 at a reunion of the 24th Virginia Infantry, Company A. The picture was taken on the front steps of the Roanoke Elks Club.

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70ish: Lessons Learned is available in paper ($9.99) and Kindle ($2.99) on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/70ish-Lessons-Learned-John-Mancini/dp/B0DV5GDMC9).

Immigrant Secrets too — https://www.amazon.com/Immigrant-Secrets-Search-My-Grandparents/dp/B0B45GTTPP.