A little off topic, but riffing off of Tom's post, when my grandmother on my mom's side became too fragile to live by her self, we moved her in with us, and I remembered helping my dad move all sorts of furniture and boxes to the garage of our house. One item was a rickety metal night stand with a single drawer.

I opened up the drawer and it was full of photographs, the top one of which was of my uncle standing in front of a DC3 on an airstrip. My dad told me to close the drawer and not worry about it, the photos would be safe.

Ten years later when both my grandmother and my father had passed away and the garage was completely cleared out again, I asked my mom about the metal stand full of pictures and she said she'd never seen it and had no idea what I was talking about.

When my uncle (the one in the picture) passed away, I did a huge search of the house, trying to find the pictures, but came up empty.

It was really heartbreaking. Luckily, this story has a happy ending though. About a year ago, my mom came to visit us and pulled out a box of pictures (about the size of the drawer). She handed it to me and asked, "Have you ever seen these? I found them with some of my mother's saved stuff." Sure enough, it was all the photos, with the DC3 shot right there.

But it tought me a very important lesson too. I took the entire box and I scanned every shot at the highest resolution my scanner allows. I then sent out disks of my scans to all of my cousins (well, the ones I'm still talking too), to make sure that every one of us had all of those pictures and that they would never get lost again.

Sorry for the long rambling post on nothing, but it hit on an important thing for me, which is that not only is it important to save those photos, but scanning them up and sharing them really matters to, because originals can easily get lost.