Many of us, or maybe it would be more accurate to say "most of us" have dozens, or hundreds of photographs of family members that we treasure.  If we are lucky we could have photographs of 5 or 6 or even 7 generations all carefully and lovingly organized into scrapbooks, photo albums, or stored in boxes, file folders or maybe framed and hanging on the living room wall.   They are pictures of ourselves, our siblings, parents, children, grandchildren, grandparents, great grandparents, cousins, and other relatives and friends.  In total that big collection of photographs make up the visual history of ourselves and our families.  

Would you be willing to gather up your family photographs, pile them in the back yard, douse them with gasoline and strike a match to the pile?  Of course not,  but many of us are blindly setting into motion that very ending of those cherished pieces of our history.  A lot of us will go to great lengths to make sure that such family treasures get passed along to those who will appreciate them but let me describe one oversight that too many of us, and our grandparents have made that makes it much less likely that those treasures will survive into the future.  

The one thing that will doom the preservation of those photographs by those who follow us is the lack of identification on them.  Just that simple.   Document the faces or those faces will become lost to history sooner than you ever thought.