One thing that the recent fires here in Victoria has made me do is reflect on what I would feel the greatest sense of loss around, apart from human life of course, should I lose possessions in a fire. For me it would be old family photographs. Someone at work said it would be items such as special things her children made and photos of them. I wouldn't feel such a sense of loss over them. Because I live so internally, if I have experienced something, my memory is a large part of my life. So because I was around when photos of my son were created, or I was there when he created that Picasso-esq piece of artwork, what is as important for me is my memory of that.
Old family photos of people I never met, or of my parents before I knew them, lie outside my memory. They are therefore more important than something I was around to experience.
This made me get around to getting a lot of them scanned so they can be stored in various places.
These are some of them. The oldest would have been taken in the late 1800s. 
Knowing that the taking of photographs took so much more effort a hundred years than it does now, hence their relative rarity, also makes them more special.
My mind then begins to create stories around these people, based on some knowledge I have of them, but largely a romantic notion of their lives in those times.
