This week, I helped a cousin find a picture he didn’t think could be found.  And I thought the chances were pretty slim I could help him find a picture of the grandfather who’d died when his father was a small child.  But somewhat miraculously, his likeness is attached to a passport application living in the National Archives and my cousin now has an image of the grandfather he never knew.

There are many pictures that I have given up for lost and gone forever, a lot of faces I don’t expect to ever see.  I don’t mean those relations who lived before cameras, people whose photographic likenesses never existed in the first place -- but those relations of the urbanized places of the 19th and 20th centuries, who I know must have had their picture taken at least once.  There are so many of them whose faces I don’t expect, realistically speaking, to ever see, though I know there is always the possibility that they still exist somewhere, in a box I’ve ignored or with a cousin I don’t know yet or in an archive I haven’t thought to search.

The picture above is an example that this can happen.  I never expected to see my great-great-grandfather Nathan’s picture because of the nature of death and war and destruction and forgetting.  Even though I have a picture of his wife Amalia, I just sort of figured it would be asking too much for a picture of Nathan to have survived as well.  But one did - in the hands of his last surviving grandson in Israel, who had one of his grandsons-in-law scan this for me so I might see it.

I know I will never find pictures of every single person on my list of forgotten faces, but to have the experience my cousin felt this week just once or twice more would be nearly enough.

Nathan Jakob Bass (1845-1931) and Amalia Friedenfeld Bass (1847-1906)