My Father's Photograph Album

I keep wondering why I, and so many others like me, are so interested in our forebears. One reason may be that we are looking for the 'us' in 'them', searching for where 'we' came from, searching for the characteristics, the strengths and the weaknesses, that have made us 'us'.

I'm fortunate that I managed to preserve, despite our constant wanderings, so many of my parents' possessions, amongst which is a photograph album of my father's. It's small, about 8"x5", and contains fifty pages, some of which have a single photograph, some two, while on some pages the photo(s) have been removed.

The photographs are rather randomly organised, with pictures which originated from my grandfather Ernest - such as the one on the left, which shows two of the officers on the Savan, one of his ships - with family pictures, as on the right. Above some, but by no means all, my father has written a comment but I recall sitting down with him, late in his life, to try to add to the information - so the picture on the left has a caption in my writing and I have added to the one on the right.

His comments are always brief, and I had great difficulty in persuading him to expand on them. The one over this picture is interesting in that it suggests to me a possible reason for the album being so haphazard: it wasn't his album but one that was given to him with pictures already in it which he subsequently edited and adapted to his use. This might help to explain why with some pictures, like this one, he has no recollection of the occasion although....

....I'm very surprised if he had completely forgotten this outing. It is the only picture I have of him swimming so there must have been a compelling reason for him to go in. One of the girls?