Mix and Match Passions

     Well, I've been busy lately, how about you? I ended up resigning my one paying position and now I have a bit more time to do some things I need to do (exercise, manage the household and paperwork) and some things I want to do. The things I want to do manage to mix and match pretty well lately, too. In addition to recently learning to love photography, I have loved working on my family genealogy off and on for about 23 years. Recently, in addition to working on my 2009 photos (almost done - I'll have more to post here soon!) I've been scanning, restoring as best I can, and uploading several photos of family members to add to my Ancestry.com Family Tree. It has been a lot of fun revisiting old photos, if bittersweet in regard to my father who died in 2002.  Another reason this has been a very  important project for me is because in October, 1981 our family home burned to the ground. May important photos of family were lost and very little survives.  It makes this project that more meaningful to me. Several of the photos that survived were of my mother and had been carried around in Dad's wallet for the 36 years of their marriage. Thus they were with him and not in the house (no one was) when it burned. These were quite a trick to restore considering that there was a lot of 'lost' data in the photographic surface that had rubbed off over the years. 

Kathy and Karen

     This photo is of my mother holding me in approximately December 1967. I was about three months old. This is the central courtyard of the apartment my parents lived in when I was born. The small portion of building visible over my head is where our apartment was on the second floor. My mother and I are facing the apartment of a dear friend, Georgie Abernathy, known as Grandma Georgie, although there was no blood relation. Can you tell I am as enamored of the genealogy as I am of the photography? As to the photography, I started with the sky and used a combination of the healing brush tool and the clone tool in Photoshop to 'fix' it. It is an odd color, and very flat looking. This was the most important thing I learned, although it took longer that just the sky restoration to learn it. I very quickly learned that on curved surfaces like cheeks, noses, and arms you have to be careful to reproduce color and shading from exactly the same curve or it will look wrong. It is very subtle and in an image as damaged as these, it is very hard to find undamaged areas that match the damaged areas well enough not to look odd. It also takes a very long time. I ended up working only on my mom's skin and hair and my face so that we could be recognized more easily. In a larger version, there are many missteps I can see. Of course the first two things I do are to copy the original image to a new layer so that I leave the first, original layer undamaged, then I 'save as' in order to always have one pristine, untouched copy of my scan or image.

Kathy Wrigley

     With this image, Dad's favorite picture of Mom, The mistakes are more obvious. The damage was again extensive, and it shows. I only worked on restoring my mother in this image. Here, I really learned how hard it is to keep the shapes and curves of skin and hair, I had so little intact image in the hair that the front, although shaped correctly, looks painted onto the image. The same is true of Mom's right shin. In the end, I left a lot of cracks and flaws in her BYU sweatshirt (her Dad's family are Mormons, can you tell?) and her denim shorts. What makes it so difficult is that the curves  along the visible edges  are not the problematic ones, but the curves along surfaces that are facing the camera. Losing that subtle shading leads to the flat look of her right shin here, as thought it were colored in as well as the hair. There just wasn't enough usable photographic material for me to restore it successfully using undamaged parts of the same leg. And to use undamaged samples from the other shin left the shading reversed and very odd and wrong looking.

     The above photo of Mom was taking in early 1966 a few months before my parents were married. Mom is 21 here and standing in front of her family home on the corner of 20th and Wisconsin on Potrero Hill in San Francisco. Her grandfather, John Lucev, an immigrant from Yugoslavia in 1910, bought the house originally  and it remained in the family until my grandmother, Mary Lucev Wrigley, passed a few years ago. At that point the home was sold. 

Grandpa Clint John Wrigley (R)

     Oh, by the way, here is a picture of her dad, my Grandpa Wrigley. He's the one on the left. I don't know anything about this photo, but I suspect he's holding a grandchild. I don't know if that's true or not or which one it might be. I would also hazard a guess that the gentleman on the right is the baby's other grandfather. If I had to, I'd think it most likely that the baby is my cousin Jennifer making the fellow on the right her Grandpa Adams. But I could be completely wrong about that.

Duane & Floyd Alexander

     This next photo is of my father with his brother. My father is the younger of the two. This photo did not ride around in a wallet, but still shows damage, probably from exposure to sunlight on the left and bottom edges. I know nothing about when or where this was taken, I think my father is about three or four years old here. If that is the case, this was most likely taken in New York state. After scanning this, I just did some touch up of dust and scratches. I had learned my lesson from the earlier photos and left the biggest damage around the edge and bottom since it did not take away from the photo at all. 

     I really wish I knew more about this photo. Foolishly, I did not ask my dad about it, although I suspect he didn't know much about it himself. He'd had a very difficult life. By this point in his life his parents had divorced and he was living in New York state with his brother, Duane, and his father, Elbert Alexander. In the early 1940s Elbert left his boys at a boarding home and went overseas to build troop housing in Ireland. With the escalating war at the end of 1942,  he felt it was time to get home to his boys. He arranged transport back to New York on the Ville de Tamatave which was part of a convoy of ships headed for Halifax, Nova Scotia. Reportedly, late on the night of 23 January, 1943 the ship lost her rudder and foundered in bad weather. The storm was so fierce that no rescue could be mounted by any of the other 28 ships in the convoy and she went down. There were no survivors. 

     This left the two boys stranded in New York. Elbert's brothers rallied and it was arranged that the boys would travel with one uncle to Los Angeles to live with another uncle and his family. Father's few memories were that life was idyllic in L.A. That, and that one day, while walking to school with his brother, a limo pulled up at the end of the alley they traversed and the door opened. Duane, the eldest, recognized his mother immediately, but Dad did not remember her. The boys were kidnapped and taken by their mother to San Francisco.  Dad always believed she did that because she believed the boys would have money coming in from their father's estate, which was not true. The boys were kept from their Alexander relatives and my dad was only reunited with those few who remained in the 1990s. Their home life with their mother was, well, what is the opposite of idyllic? Tragic? 

Floyd Alexander

     But he persevered. Amazingly so, considering what he went through almost from the time he was born. He grew up on Potrero Hill in San Francisco too. As a matter of fact, his home was six houses uphill from Mom's house. And eventually, they noticed each other and began dating. This photo of Dad was taken in 1966 while on a camping trip with my Mom and her family in the Sierra Nevadas. Dad would really appreciate it if you notice his hair. Very nicely styled for a camping trip, don't you think. He always took care to look his very best.

Rae & Karen Alexander

     Mom and Dad were married in July of 1966. I was born in 1967 and my sister, Rae in 1970. Aren't we cute! This was taken at Christmas, 1970 and Rae is almost a year old. Mom and Dad's marriage lasted for 36 years until Dad's death in 2002.