The largest family album in the world

Have you ever thought how the fates of people and the fates of their photographs are related?

I began to understand these relations better when Bonnie Price sent me copies of the photographs that were brought to the USA from Latvia in 1907 by her great-grandfather's Rubenis' family. The photographs were kept all this time in the family albums, though the people finally forgot who were pictured on them. Bonnie just wrote - perhaps somebody else has a photograph like one of hers. Then it might be possible to identify whose picture she has.

This was a rather new idea for me. And I really showed these photos to everyone I spoke about this family history. Nobody, who had the same photographs, was found, but nevertheless now the pictures are understood better than it was at the beginning, and it is clear that not all of them are presenting images of Bonnie's relatives. There are also pictures of the relatives of somebody else, who maybe even can not imagine that such pictures ever existed. In any case, it is quite clear that if I could show the photographs to more people, the problem would not seem so hopeless.

Bonnie should be happy she has so many old photographs. They are so frequently lost. No fire cases are needed, even if one changes an apartment in the same city, a photograph may accidentally slip out and be lost. But if one should cross the ocean, and the weight of the luggage is restricted? No doubt, one will select the pictures to take with and to leave out.

I guess that at the beginning of the 20^th century the photographs were relatively expensive, and therefore people regarded them like an item of a good financial value and did not throw out easily. May be this is one of the reasons why Rubenis' family brought so many photographs with them. But, of course, they wanted to have the remembrance of the life and the people in Livland.

In any case, one may say that Rubenis family photographs emigrated to the US together with their owners.

Kersten Stubendorff writes to me that his father left Latvia in 1939 as a German and stayed in the Poznan [Posen] district up to1944 when escaped the approaching Soviet Army with only one suitcase in each hand. The family photographs were not in these suitcases. They had no possibility of escaping and disappeared for ever.

Those who left Latvia at that time and moved westward were not in much better situation. When they were to decide what to take with them, it sometimes happened that photographs were left alone to fight for surviving. They lost this struggle quite frequently.

And how about them who fled from Latvia in July 1941 together with the Red Army pushed by Nazi Germans eastward? As a rule, they arrived at their offices in the morning and were ordered to go immediately. Who thought on the photographs?

When a group of uniformed persons visited a family and ordered the people to pack up in 2 hours for being transported to "remote regions of the Soviet Union" (that means to Siberia), there was not so much time to decide - either take family album or, say, a piece of salted meat for kids. In some cases the photographs were also exiled, in other cases they hid themselves at the relatives or neighbors but frequently they disappeared.

And after the "actions" of the Holocaust, the Ghetto streets were covered with photographs. They were swept up and killed like their owners.

The project of the largest family album in the world

There are also some differences in the fates of people and photographs, however. A photographer always makes several copies of a photograph even if only one person is photographed. Photographs are cloned, if you like the modern language. The pictured person retains one copy and distributes other copies among his/her relatives and friends, or perhaps brings a copy to an office to get a document. I conclude - and this is the crucial point - that even if a person now possesses no family photographs at all, one or more old photographs of his/her family could be found in someone's family album. Because statistically more people remained in their homes, than left them willingly or unwillingly, and statistically much more people still have their family albums.

Visiting old-book stores, I discovered that there are offered photographs of real people. The market of old photographs is not very active, but it is possible to sell some of them, especially if they show a uniformed person or a nice lady in fashionable clothing. Therefore the owners of the stores buy photographs from family albums, if they are brought to them. I have bought many of them there, no matter if I have ever heard of the pictured person or not. Now I am ready to start a project called "The largest family album in the world" .

I am going to publish prewar photographs of people as many as I can, if I have the smallest hope once to discover who is pictured on the photograph. And I am inviting everybody, who has the possibility, to publish old photographs of their family albums. As the final result of the project, we should have on the Web the photographs of all the people who ever were photographed in Latvia. This will be the largest family album in the world, and it would continue growing until it would contain the pictures of all the people ever photographed in the whole world. And then the project will be completed.

Validation of the project

At the first glance the project seems stupid. After thinking a bit, it becomes quite clear the project is plain stupid. Really, let us estimate the resources it needs. There were about 2 million people in Latvia at 1939, and each year died a bit less than 30 000 persons. If the death rate was the same all the time when photographing became common, which I estimate was 40 years, then  about 1.2 million persons died during this time span. Let us add also the people lost in wars, refugees, and émigrés. Totally it makes about additional 2 million. It follows that the number of persons whose photographs should be gathered is about 4 million.

I think I have collected during 7 years more than 4000 photographs of different people (also counting in the persons on group photographs). It follows that at least 1000 other stocks of this amount are needed to complete the project. I do not say there do not exist larger collections of photographs, may be 10 of them, but not 1000, be sure.

If working hard, I managed to publish 10 photographs per day, what I can not, the whole project would demand 400,000 days or about 2000 men years. I doubt whether I would be allowed to work so long time by the Latvia Law.

Publishing of a photograph can not be done free of charge. Scanning, hosting, analyzing, collecting of related information, managing of eventual databases - all this work, paid or unpaid, is worth something. I estimate the expenses could be more than 10 dollars for a person or 40 million USD for all the project. Well, let us make it cheaper - 10 million USD, but there is no difference, because this money will never been spent for such a project.

If 100 kilobytes should be allocated for the photographs of a person, it makes 400 gigabytes of memory for all the project. The disks with capacity of 40 gigabytes are available now and even better will be available soon, so it would be possible to fill with this information only 10 of them. Thus from this side of view the project occurs to be realistic.

What to do now?

As for me, I am going to continue.