Language Hat has written a piece about bungalows and how people feel about this old-fashioned word nowadays. For me it’s two things: there’s the John Lennon song Bungalow Bill, a pun about Buffalo Bill living in (in my mind, at least) an English suburban red-brick bungalow. The other is what was always know in my family as ‘The’ Bungalow.
My uncle, in the foreground, in 1927. The bungalow was always painted cream with pale green trim.
One of my great-grandmother’s seven children had rheumatoid arthritis, a horrible chronic disease that left him paralyzed. His doctors recommended that he get some sea air and so during the First World War my great-grandmother built a little summer house by the sea in Norfolk. She died at 45, in the great flu epidemic of 1918 and my great-grandfather died a couple of years later. The children moved themselves down to the bungalow and ran wild there for nearly two years — or until someone complained about the gramophone they were playing in the garden. That led to an aunt returning them to captivity. When they grew up they spent their holidays there with their own families (there were four or five bedrooms, but it was one of those small summer houses that could absorb lots of visitors).
Note the expression on my great-aunt's face. This was because of the water temperature.
I went there as a child too, there was always a strong East wind that originated someplace like Siberia or Sweden– swimming in the North Sea was a bracing ordeal that I never want to repeat — but there were rock-pools and a lovely lagoon with crabs.
The Norfolk coastline is subject to constant erosion; arriving at the bungalow after the winter storms the first thing to do was see how much of ‘the plot’ had dropped into the sea since last time you were there. Twenty years ago, the bungalow was finally sold by the last of the children (Betty, my great-aunt, in the bathing suit, above) to some families of Hassidim. Later this century it will disappear.
All these photographs were taken by my grandfather. In this picture below — of his wife (my grandmother) and daughter (my mother) — his caption is about the vehicle licence plates. He’s done it in several other pictures too.
A Bad Guide 
We spent Boxing Day once with friends at their “beach shack” on the Southern Ocean, a short drive from Adelaide. It was, in fact, a very well appointed bungalow.
And probably a hell of a lot warmer than Christmas on the Norfolk coast.
You’re lucky to be able to identify everyone in these photos despite such helpful captions as “VG 7961”! I have some photo albums from comparable time periods, as well as some 8 mm movies taken by an adoptive Norwegian great-grandfather in the 40’s, where we can only guess who anybody is.
I’ve struggled with whether and how to put the results of my own genealogical research on the web, and I like the approach you’re showing here. Maybe I’ll work up the nerve to try something.
In this picture below — of his wife (my grandmother) and daughter (my mother) — his caption is about the vehicle licence plates. He did that a lot.
Whoa whoa. He did that a lot? Huh? Why? I need more information here.
My mother talks about her family’s bungalow in Brooklyn often, though it’s long since been replaced by a skyscraper or something. I hope to have a special place to share with Jim someday.
SnowLeopard,
You can have an entirely private WordPress blog, where people have to sign in, or you can make some posts private and others public. If your family is like Kron that might work. My family is not, and even though I set up their email addresses and passwords, they won’t use them. So my family blog I haven’t done much with–if anything is done with it, it will have to be done by me.
It’s hard to think ahead with that one right now because my father is seriously ill. Do I take pictures of him now?–he’s still himself, but he doesn’t look the same. And how would anyone feel about that later? It’s just too hard to think about so I don’t, but maybe I’m missing some opportunity I shouldn’t miss.
Bungalow Jim?
I just meant I’ve got more pictures that he gave licence plate captions to. And my mother told me he wrote the car number on something — like the dog’s collar, but I’ve forgotten what.
Whereabouts in Brooklyn? Sunnyside, in Queens, is kind of bungalowesque.
My experience, having had several relatives who died of cancer, is that it’s hard to forget how they looked right before they died and hard to remember them as they had been for most of their lives.
Sure. If you do it as SnowLeopard (good name), possibly mentioning the last name in a caption to a photograph, you might make contact with a distant cousin who will reveal all your family mysteries. I found some information that way. I emailed a woman I found by googling a family name.
However, this should not be construed as advice, caveat leopardor, etc., etc. :-)
Nijma,
I’m very sorry about your father. For what it’s worth, maybe nothing, what you may find to be of far more valuable than pictures of your father at this point are the stories he can share with you about his own life, and his family history, and what he knows about the context of photographs in old albums. Perhaps it’s too painful or awkward to have such a discussion now, but who knows, he may find some comfort in it. When my mother died it turned out that she had been the repository of all that information for her side of the family, including her cousins, and the notes I had taken down from her as a semi-interested teenager were all that anyone had left. I was glad for what I had, and found the act of writing up those stories, and then writing down everything I knew about her, to be an enormous comfort during the grieving process. That may not work for everyone. I have subsequently interviewed my father at considerable length about his rather shocking (and perhaps book-worthy) life as a child in Germany in the 30’s, 40’s, and early 50’s; the challenges there, of finding independent corroboration for some of the things he recalls, and his difficulties in recalling events from 60 years ago, or locating even a single scrap of the music my grandfather composed and conducted in public performances, are of a somewhat different nature but are definitely preferable to ignorance.
I’ll think about your suggestion of a password-protected blog. One of my concerns has been identity theft, since I’ve been a victim of that many times over already and don’t want any other living relatives to be subject to it. On the other hand, reserving it solely for family (and mine, like yours, will never use it) would prevent whatever benefits, as AJP suggests, would come from publicity.
Very good suggestion, SL. Write your father’s book!
My father-in-law recently died of cancer. While he was ill my wife took a tape recorder and recorded his memories of being in a bomb-disposal team. He had been cleaning up booby traps after the Germans fled north Norway at the end of WW2. This was something that he had had on his mind — he felt these were some amazing stories, quite violent — and he had never told them to anyone. Many people have something they ought to tell, think of Studs Terkel’s interviews.
Thank you so much SnowLeopard. Everything helps, nothing helps. I have always been the one people turn to for comfort so it seems odd to have someone comfort me. More when I return from Easter. Bad news from the doctor today– it will be difficult visit.
My departure is postponed until morning.
I am fascinated by the photo technique. I have such a hard time photographing photos–I end up taking the picture from about three feet away and cropping it severely, probably losing a lot of what little quality I imagine digital photos to have. Also I was really impressed with the focus on the windowpane while the rest of the picture was out of focus. Did you do that with a camera that has a control for f-stop? I have gone from a camera with an internal light meter in a photography course I took to a somewhat automatic point and shoot thingy and now a digital one. It’s so cheap to use by just recharging batteries that photography is again an affordable hobby for me. But I despair of getting quality photos with the digital camera. Is it too techy to ask how you do it?
Tomorrow we will be sorting photos for a wedding anniversary party and I will bring the digital camera with a short movie function along…
If you want to peek at what I’ve been doing, the portal is at my URL for a very very short period of time. There is a sort of hobbit style speak-friend-and-enter “Spring Break” portal on the home page that invisible friends can enter by remembering where we met and who introduced us. I am interested to test it and see if it works.
Yes, it works. Your father looks so Norwegian.
We have a digital SLR camera that is really my wife’s, a Canon. It has lots of pixels, so that she can blow something up to a couple of metres square if she wants to. So I use it, but I’m no photography expert, and I usually just have it on automatic. BUT I do use a tripod on my desk (by the window) when I take pictures of old photos, so there’s no movement blur. Then I put the result in photoshop, which has a ‘sharpen focus’ feature, as well as making it possible to adjust the contrast and brightness (of the whole image or just small parts, if you want to). I can also adjust the color. I’ve improved a lot of old pictures that way, and detail often emerges that wasn’t visible before. Sure it was expensive, but a) it’s equipment we need for our jobs, and b) the result is beyond judging by how much money it cost. The problem with our camera is that it’s big and heavy, you can’t just slip it out of your pocket.
Can’t you can get photoshop cheaply through the place you teach?
Thank you, the comments look secure too, even in the feedreader.
I have a pocket Cannon with 7.1 megapixels for around a hundred dollars, but it looks like to get something measurable better I would need to spend ten times that and get a zillion megapixels. Every once in a while I google cameras, but I don’t have kids and it’s hard to justify. I also just found out I’m losing my Saturday hours this summer. They already cut me back to 16 hours a week this semester. Not a good time to want things.
I use Irfanview for everything. You can use it to crop, do screen shots, color adjustments, …it’s probably not as sophisticated as a program you pay for, but it’s pretty good and a free download. No software really available at work, although its a good place to connect with other geeks who know how to get stuff done.
The family project I think my brother will do. He has some very nice toys.
My dad’s half Swedish, from the other half comes, among other things, the mysterious Norman connection to Hrolf the Walker.
There’s a program called Paintshop Pro that you can get on a free trial that’s quite a bit cheaper than Photoshop. You can repair missing bits of photos and enhance color using several possible algorithms.
The impression I’m getting here about blogs is that publishing names is not good, and any public images of anyone are not good, but minors even more so. Teenagers are getting to the age when they will be looking for jobs–the first thing a potential employer does is google the applicants. Example–the education major who was denied a degree in spite of fulfilling all the requirements after school officials found a photo of her on Facebook at a party dressed in a pirate costume. It seems a shame, but I don’t think it’s just paranoia. People can be strange these days–I remember simpler times here when people could even leave their doors unlocked.
Also about passwords–some 40% of all passwords on the web can be cracked easily by machine just by putting in all the known words in the dictionary. To get unbreakable passwords, you have to use some numbers or a mixture of small letters and caps. Seeing a password protected area can just be a spur to finding out what’s behind it.
I’ve heard of Paintshop Pro, though I’ve never tried it.