MY UNCLE AND my mom died within 18 months of each other. Both times, I inherited thousands.

Not dollars—family photos. Pictures were stuffed into shoeboxes, manila envelopes and supermarket plastic bags—mostly unmarked and in no order whatsoever. Overwhelmed, I stashed them in the basement and tried not to think about them.

Then along came COVID-19 and months of lockdown. I decided if I was ever going to sort through the boxes, this was the time. Laying out the photos on my dining room table was like curating a museum exhibit of 20th-century photography. They began with studio portraits of my grandparents in rich sepia tones and progressed to blurry black-and-white images taken with my father’s Brownie box camera. Color and a bit more quality arrived in the photos taken after he bought a Kodak Instamatic flashcube camera.

As I started sorting, I realized that my sister and I were now the family’s historians. It was our responsibility to make sure others knew who all the people in these photos—their ancestors—were. That’s when I started Throwback Thursday.

Every Thursday, I selected five of these old prints and snapped a photo of each on my iPhone. I wrote a bit about each one: who was in it, how they were related, what they were like. Then I texted them to my nieces and nephews and their children. (I didn’t email them. Gen Zers detest email.)

When I sent an Army photo of my father, I relayed that during World War II, he was stationed on Governors Island in New York. One night he went AWOL to visit a woman he had just met. The MPs caught him, and he received 30 days of confinement to the post. He eventually married that woman—my mom.

When I sent a shot of my Uncle Danny, I wrote about the time he invited his parish priest over for lobster dinner. It was a hot day, Danny had one too many, and when dinnertime arrived, my tipsy uncle stumbled and sent a lobster flying across the table and onto the floor. (Thirty years later, my aunt still had not fully forgiven him.)

All the while during this fun project, I was painlessly digitizing the best photos.

My favorite part of Throwback Thursday was watching the younger generation react to the styles of yesteryear. When I was in college, I had a thick, round Afro—second only to that of Linc from the old TV show Mod Squad. My nieces and nephews couldn’t believe I ever looked like that. The worst razzing I received was when I sent a photo of me in brown-and-white-striped herringbone bell bottoms. (I deserved the razzing.)

The project was often bittersweet. I loved seeing photos of deceased family members, but sometimes I found myself mourning their loss all over again. At other times, I wished I could magically jump into a photo and warn the person of a bad decision they were about to make or a tragedy that awaited them.

Conversely, I greatly enjoyed figuring out how old my parents were in a photo and where they were in their journey through life, and seeing how my journey compares.

When I announced that I was running out of photos to send and stories to share, my nieces and nephews were genuinely disappointed. Throwback Thursday had become something they looked forward to every week. I took that as a win.

But like Al Pacino says in The Godfather Part III: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” Cleaning out the basement, I found another box of photos from my parents. There were hundreds of images, including the only known photo of one great-uncle and a photo of another great-uncle from 1945 that I think ran in Stars and Stripes (it has government-approval stamps on the back). So Throwback Thursday came back in a big way.

It’s been said that you die twice—once when you take your final breath, and again when someone says your name for the last time. I hope I manage to keep some beloved members of my family alive for a good while longer.