The Boothbay Register has thousands upon thousands of photos in its office. Some of the prints are either identified with attached paper tags or information written on the back. Other photos, such as the ones used online and in this week’s issue regarding the February 1997 basketball season, were scanned from negatives and not identified. Luckily, having lived here all of my life (so far), I knew the subjects. Between 1990 and about 2012, we have monthly books of negatives/contact sheets and, when we went to digital photography in 2003, we saved the photos on CDs. Before 1990, most of the prints were saved in boxes and storage cabinets. We have a dump truck load of those gathering dust, many from the 1950s to 1990.

The old photos are fun to look at. I don’t know if the subject of basketball or the black and white photos drew about 950 looks onto this week’s online article, but nonetheless, I am glad that we still have the photos/negatives to use for these projects.

It is also frustrating that time passes by so quickly that many of these photos have not been identified. I sometimes look at the faces, locations, etc. but I can’t put a name/ID to them. Deadlines had to be met, staffing and methods of marking photos changed and sometimes there is no ID at all – just stuffed away.

It would take a small community effort to get at least 75% of the non-identified photos to be ID’d. In the past I had thought about displaying many of our photos at a local gathering, perhaps at the Fourth of July event on the Common, the regular craft shows, or at the Opera House, so people could drop by to help get them identified. It is still just a thought.

We can match up many of the photographs from the pages of our newspaper, but knowing what year the photos were taken (other than our negatives/contact sheets and CDs) would sometimes be like searching for a needle in a haystack, especially the prints from the 50s to the 90s.

Photos are part of the local history and perhaps in my future retirement years, it might be a fun project to undertake.