Throughout the twenty-four years of our marriage, my first [late] wife - a professional studio photographer (up until we wed) - found time to arrange hundreds of old black & white family photos ... many of them (including a fair few in sepia) dating back to the 19th century ... into an almost unique collection, based on information gleaned from her father, whose forebears had dabbled in photography almost since its inception in the 1840s.

Phew, turned out to be a somewhat lengthier sentence than I'd intended ... !

Anyway, most of the 'regulars' here will recall my mentioning at various times that Iris suffered from rheumatoid arthritis which, understandably, meant she was advised on medical grounds to refrain from going out to work after our two kids started school.

Consequently, once she'd attended to her daily household chores, she'd settle down to sort all those old photos in chronological order and finally put them into albums.

Having completed that rather onerous task, she then concentrated on all the more up to date ones she/we'd taken in the course of our own lives as a family ... incorporating numerous press cuttings of interest, ranging from the late 1960s to 1991 the year of her death; indeed she completed the last batch a fortnight before she died.

Resultantly, I now have a large cabinet filled to capacity with all this photographic memorabilia ... albeit the older collection featuring lots of people whom neither she nor I had ever known in our lifetimes (given that they were long dead before she and I were born) are now in her older brother's custody while the more modern ones are among my most prized possessions.