Not long ago, I read a blog post where the author sat down with an elderly relative, went through old photos with the person and labeled all that they knew. The author then threw all the rest of the photos away without even scanning them. I don’t subscribe to that theory at all and here’s why.

More and more photos are being shared on line. That means the chances of finding someone else with the same photo you have increases. Maybe that person even knows who is in one of your mystery photos.

I was trolling the family trees online for Dave’s relatives and came across several photos that looked very familiar. Here is one from my own collection; I know that she is related to the Stufflebeans, but had no idea who she is. There is no one left in our immediate family who can identify her. Well, now I know who she is!

Dolores Baker

This cute little girl is Dolores Baker, the daughter of my father-in-law’s aunt, Myrtle Stufflebean Baker. I found a cropped version of this very same photo, showing just Dolores’s face and neckline, on someone else’s family tree.

I even have some family photos of Dolores after she married and had children of her own, but I didn’t recognize that this was her from the adult photos.

Moral of this story: Please don’t throw away old photos. You never know when a photo mystery might be solved.