Photo Animation - Part 3

Paternal Grandmother From Childhood to Old Age

Only one of my grandparents lived long enough for me to know well - my paternal grandmother, Barbara. I remember her mostly as an old woman, growing older and more feeble with each passing year. But all old people were young and vibrant long ago. They were once children with attractive, unwrinkled faces. They grew into fair young adults before morphing into the elderly grandparents we grandchildren came to know. Through the magic of photo animation I was able to follow my grandmother through time from about 1894 to 1966 and better imagine her life before my birth.

In 1894 my grandmother was a blond-haired seven or eight year-old daughter of Polish immigrants. She looked like this:

Four or five years later, in 1898 or 1899, Barbara was roughly 12 years old, sporting earrings, and growing into a lovely teenager.

I wish I had pictures of Barbara's wedding to my grandfather, Michael, in 1905. She would have been in the prime of youth then, and, I imagine, strikingly beautiful. Unfortunately, no wedding pictures exist to my knowledge. I was told she tore them all up in grief over the early death of Michael in 1927. I have only two damaged pictures of my grandparents together in 1926. Barbara must have missed destroying these two. A colorized version of one of these is shown next. The left side of Barbara's face is overexposed and smudged by some kind of scraping. 

I worked to repair damage to Barbara's face in Photoshop, but there was no way to completely restore the unblemished photo. The following color animation represents Barbara at about age 40. 

Four years later, at age 44 in 1930, Barbara's face was more rounded, and her hair was darker in this black and white animation.

In about 1937 Barbara sat proudly before her five children in this colorized family portrait. My 23 year-old father, Stanley, is second from the right.

Barbara's 51 year-old face still looked far from old in the next animation.

A World War II era black and white picture from 1944 showed 58 year-old Barbara now wearing glasses and beginning to resemble the grandmother I knew.

Five years later, on February 17, 1949, I was grandma's third grandchild. She was 63 and looked happy to see my chubby presence on her lap!

On November 25, 1952 grandma's hair still had blond color as I watched her prepare Thanksgiving turkey.

At my high school graduation on June 21, 1966 grandma was 80 years old but still able to stand firmly.

I used Photoshop to manually remove flash reflections from grandma's glasses. Unfortunately, this produced a slight distortion of her right side eyelid in the following animation. Otherwise, the animation gives a hint of her former beauty and spirit.

Nine years later, in the summer of 1975, after a series of heart attacks and strokes took their toll, grandma was largely confined to bed and could barely walk. In this last picture she sits in front of my parents and my newly married brother, Richard, and his wife, Sindi.

Barbara died on July 17, 1978 at age 92.