Sometimes we don't have to look too far back in time to find interesting items to include in our family history.
Vintage Aerial is an example of this. Their booth at RootsTech gave people the opportunity to look through their collection to find pictures of their farms and rural homes.
The collection contains 18 million aerial photographs from 41 states. Photographs in their collection date back to the 1960s and cover a large part of the rural eastern US. The area of coverage varies by year, so you may not always find a picture of the property you are looking for.
You can search by address to see if there were any flights in the area. Your search will produce a series of film rolls which you will have to scroll through to find the images you are looking for. Once you find the image you can like, share on Facebook and add a comment about the property. You can also order a variety of prints of the image for your own collection. The people who visited them at RootsTech were given a 4"x6" print of the image at no cost.
How are these images important to your family history? They show how a family's land has changed over time. Did your family add to their home? Did they clear more land? Is there something in the photo, such as a car, that brings back a memory that you had forgotten?
I would like to include a set of the pictures of the house where I grew up as an example of how these can help tell the story of your family's life.
1974 - This is the house I grew up in. We didn't own the house in 1974 but we knew the owner, Kenneth Filburn. He died in an auto accident which occurred on October 21, 1976. The house is up on blocks.
1979 - We moved into the house around 1977 and survived the Blizzard of '78. It took a lot of work to plow our driveway and the one lane road to our house was snowed in for several days. Looking closely at the picture you can see a cleared area next to the barn. That was our garden. There are also several sheds along the tree line where we stored our wood for the fireplace. We had also added the utility room to the back of the house by this time. There is also a small flower garden and bird bath near the corner of the house. The patch of trees between the driveway and barn was our buckeye grove. The underside of the house has now been closed in.
1982 - There have been more changes by this time. The most noticeable is the pond. All of the material removed from the pond was placed in the clearing to create a hill that gave us more elevation for the pond. There is also a chicken coop in front of the barn. We raised a variety of livestock including chickens, rabbits, sheep, pigs, and ducks. The sheep pen runs along the fence line by the cornfield.
1990 - In this photo you can see that we had added a room to the front of the house as well as a garage between the house and barn. This garage was a 2-car garage with a sunroom on the side where my mom spent much of her time. She had furniture, a small library, and a stereo in that room. There are also rows of pines and Russian olives that we planted along both sides of the pond. I also noticed a picnic table in the area between the pond and woods. Another change is the removal of the green aluminum siding and the addition of white vinyl siding.
Based on those four photographs I was able to cover nearly 20 years of my childhood and write this short story. Imagine what you could do with your family's photos and how that could provide a start to an interview with a grandparent. Check out the site and see if you can find your homes.
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