What Would You Do? Overlapping Rolls of Film

These pictures show various scenes from the farm, some sand dunes, and a trip Ellen took to the Grand Canyon and southern Utah. The Grand Canyon being the theme du jour, it is a good time to post this odd assortment of pictures. All are from Grandpa's slides and were developed in July 1970.

Sometimes putting pictures in the proper order is like solving a puzzle. If you do not enjoy puzzles, just enjoy the pictures, write any names or stories you know about the pictures into the comments, and skip the rest of the text.

These pictures were all developed at the same time and had no additional information about the development printed on the slide frames to set them apart. To further complicate things, they arrived from different collections at different times. This post is my attempt to put them back in order and reconstruct the original rolls of film with the slides in the proper order.

Each roll of film lacks most of the slides, so the collection is incomplete. The slides were all numbered, and they all contained some information written on the slide mount that I incorporated into the file name for each image. You can see this information by clicking on the image and saving it to your computer (the default file name will show the information) or by looking on the right side of the URL for each clicked picture. This is cumbersome, so I provide what I think is the pertinent information at various places within the slides.

The slides were named using GAP's fancy pants file naming system, with one exception and one caveat. The exception is that at the beginning of each slide is a two digit number that I added for purposes of this post to group the pictures in the correct order (per the printed slide frame number) and by roll (I grouped them into four rolls, each roll's numbering beginning at a multiple of 10). Thus, the earliest frame of the first roll has 01, the second earliest from of the first roll has 02, the earliest frame of the second roll has 10, the second earliest from of the second roll has 11, etc. The caveat is that several of the file names have a Roman numeral (I or II) after the "JUL 70", which was an unsuccessful attempt by me to distinguish the rolls when scanning and naming the images; ignore this number, it means nothing now.

The pictures in this post are not in the order that they are on the DVD I sent out. If anyone is still reading this -- which I doubt -- and is interested in solving the puzzle -- which I really doubt -- you may want to pull the images for July 1970 off the DVD and sort them out yourself. If nothing else, you may get a sense of what GAP goes through when trying to recompile family history from little bits and pieces.

The rules I followed when arranging these are:

1. The order has to be logical;
2. The slide frame numbers within each roll have to increase from one frame to the next, since this is the order the pictures were taken; and
   
3. The content of the pictures has to make sense in the context of the picture groupings.
   

Numbers 1 and 3 are explained below. Number 2 you can take for granted ... or you can look at the slide numbers in the file name to check my work.

OK, here is my grouping and reasons.

Roll 1 - These pictures are a different size and shape than the others and had increasing frame numbers with no overlap, so I grouped these together as one roll of film. I put them first because the weather looks colder and, thus, earlier in the year than in the other rolls of film. Can you name the people and the place?







Roll 2 - These pictures start on the farm and conclude at the Grand Canyon. I reason that there was a roll of film with farm pictures in the camera that was taken to the Grand Canyon. I grouped these pictures together because they had increasing frame numbers with no overlap. I could not group the farm pictures with the later pictures from Zion's or Bryce Canyon because the frame number would have overlapped. What is going on in the farm pictures?







Roll 3 - These pictures start at Cedar Breaks, continue into Zion's, and conclude at Bryce Canyon. I reason that the roll of film was changed between the previous Grand Canyon picture and the following Cedar Breaks picture because the frame numbers reset between the two and the picture content naturally breaks between them. What were Ellen and friends doing on this trip?










Roll 4 - These pictures contain only Bryce Canyon. I reason that the roll of film was changed at Bryce Canyon because the frame numbers reset. I placed this roll after the previous one because Bryce Canyon pictures conclude the previous roll and begin this one.




Thus, I reasoned that the chronological order of the pictures is as follows:

1. Sand dunes (probably on a different camera than the rest)
2. Farm
3. Grand Canyon
4. Cedar Breaks
5. Zion's
6. Bryce Canyon

Other explanations could be that there were more than four rolls of film developed in July 1970 or that there were multiple trips to the same locations, making the obvious grouping of pictures the wrong one. Perhaps someone knows the answer and can clarify this? If clarified, I will update the image file names in the collection of slides to reflect the proper chronological order.

What would you do?

I am guessing that, if anything, what you are doing is smiling slightly, shaking your head in a sad sort of way, and clicking over to something more interesting. At least, that's what I will do after I read this!

UPDATE

Woohoo! Ellen writes in the comments that I got the order of the pictures correct.

Yes, Rob, you have organized these pictures correctly. I took a trip with my girlfriends, Mary Tucker, Ellen Millett and Patty Millett, to Grand Canyon, Cedar Breaks, Zion's and Bryce Canyon one summer about 1970 or so. I probably borrowed Grandpa's camera because all those pictures are of my trip. It was really fun. Thanks for the memories.

Thanks, Ellen! Your help filling in the details of these pictures is always appreciated. Plus, I can now stop fiddling with trying to get the pictures in the correct order. I will relabel the file names to ensure that these are organized correctly, and I will include the updated names the next time I send out a DVD. This is a good example of why it is useful to replace previous versions of the pictures with new ones; sometimes identifying information is updated!

The pictures in Roll 1 above are now the subject of Mystery Picture 100108.