Vintage Photos - Oestreicher (1233-1236)

See the previous post in this series here.

I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s. These came to me second hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are many thousands of these slides. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.

Getting your pictures processed as slides used to be pretty common but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides from the late 1950s that I acquired after he died. That along with having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.

This set continues a large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer (or perhaps a friend or family member) from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/

Many of these slides had the date they were processed stamped or printed on them. I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date.

Click the link below to also see versions processed with color restoration and Digital ICE which is a hardware based dust and scratch remover, a feature of the Epson V600 scanner I am using. There are also versions processed with the simpler dust removal option along with color restoration.

This set of photos continues a series that looks like they were taken in the late 1980s or early 1990s and include photos at a Confederate grave (see https://hive.blog/photography/@darth-azrael/vintage-photos-oestreicher-1205-1208 for example). I'm not sure where the first three photos in this set were taken other than they must have been at or near the cemetery. The final photo shows the grave again but the name is clear for the first time...Isaac J Whiteley. Presumably these people are somehow related. A little research matched this up with an Isaac Jasper Whiteley that was born in 1836 and died in 1922. The grave is in Walnut Grove (AKA Boxley) Cemetery in Arkansas so I was wrong about this being in Alabama.

Below is a photo of what I believe to be the same grave as above, taken in 2008 at Walnut Grove (Boxley) Cemetery in Arkansas from https://arkansasgravestones.org/view.php?id=72252

The site above has an option to e-mail the contributor (via a web form) of that photo/grave entry (referred to only as bill). I wonder if he would know who the people in these pictures are (or maybe even be in some of them)? Of course, the entry is 13 years old and they may not be at whatever email the form leads to...or even alive.

Anyway, I'm sending the following message as soon as I post this and get the link. I'll followup if anything results from it.

The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can also be found here.