The Uniform in the Closet: Preserving the Photos of the Family Members Who Served

In most American families, there is at least one photo of a young person in a uniform.

Sometimes it's framed and on a wall. More often it's in a drawer somewhere — a black-and-white print of a grandfather in his twenties, looking impossibly young in his Army dress greens, or a faded color shot of an uncle on a flight line in Vietnam, or a stiff portrait of a great-great-grandfather in a wool tunic from a war whose name you'd have to look up.

You probably know roughly who they are. You probably do not know much else.

This Memorial Day weekend, while families gather and grills come out and small flags appear on lawns, is a good moment to think about those photos. Not in a grand or performative way. Just practically. Because the photos of the family members who served are some of the most historically important images in your house, and they are also, almost always, the ones with the thinnest layer of story attached.

The photos you almost certainly have

If you've never gone looking, you might not realize how many service-related photos are scattered through a family's collection. They're not all dramatic portraits. The categories worth searching for include:

• The enlistment or commissioning portrait — usually formal, often the photo that ended up framed in a parent's or grandparent's house
• Snapshots from training — group photos of a basic training class, a barracks shot, a buddy on a bunk
• Photos sent home from deployment — often small prints, sometimes with writing on the back, occasionally on V-Mail or military postcards from older wars
• Homecoming photos — at a train station, an airport, a front porch, a family kitchen
• Reunion photos — taken decades later, at unit reunions, with men who all suddenly look the same age again
• The uniform itself, photographed or worn at a wedding, a christening, a funeral, a parade

Some of these will be in albums. Many will be loose, in envelopes, in the bottoms of drawers, in boxes mixed in with ordinary snapshots. If you have a relative who served and you haven't specifically gone looking, plan to spend an hour this weekend doing exactly that. You will almost always find more than you expected.

Why these photos are different

Service photos carry a kind of historical weight that most family photos don't. They sit at the intersection of your family's private history and a much larger public one. The young man in the photo wasn't just somebody's grandfather — he was at a particular base, in a particular unit, in a particular war, doing a particular job alongside particular other people, some of whom didn't come home.

That context is what makes the photo matter, and it's also what disappears the fastest.

Most families know the broad strokes — "Grandpa was in the Navy" — and almost nothing more specific. What ship. What years. What ocean. Whether he saw combat. What he did afterward that he never talked about. The name of the friend standing next to him in the only photo from his deployment.

That information, in most families, lives in exactly one or two people's heads. And when those people are gone, the photo stops being a photo of a Navy radio operator on the USS Whatever in 1944. It becomes a photo of "Grandpa, in some uniform, somewhere."

What to do this weekend, specifically

You don't need to start a yearlong project this Memorial Day. But there are three small things worth doing in the next few days, in roughly this order.

First, find the photos. Go through whatever you have — albums, boxes, the framed photos on the walls of older relatives' houses if you're visiting them this weekend. Pull out everything that shows a uniform, a base, a ship, a plane, a piece of military equipment, a flag-draped anything. Make a small pile. You're not organizing yet; you're just gathering.

Second, photograph the photos. Even if you plan to do a serious scanning project later — and our guide on how to digitize and preserve your family's photo albums walks through that in detail — there is no reason not to take a quick phone photo of every service photo you find this weekend. The Google PhotoScan app does a surprisingly good job for free. The point isn't archival quality. The point is that by Sunday night, you will have a copy of every one of those photos on your phone, where they cannot be lost in a basement flood.

Third, and most important: ask while you can. If you are seeing older relatives this weekend — a parent, an aunt, an uncle, an in-law — bring some of those photos with you. Show them. Ask. Record the conversation on your phone's voice memo app, even if it feels awkward. You do not have to transcribe it now. You just have to capture it.

Useful questions, in roughly increasing order of depth:

• Do you know who this is, and when this was taken?
• Where were they stationed? What did they do?
• Do you know any of the other people in the photo?
• Did they ever talk about it? What did they say?
• What were they like when they came home?

Some of these questions will get a shrug. Some will get a one-line answer. And occasionally, one of them will open a door, and you'll get twenty minutes of a story you've never heard, about a person you thought you knew, that nobody else in the family has ever heard either. That recording, on your phone, is now one of the most valuable things your family owns.

A note on the photos of the ones who didn't come back

Some families have photos of relatives who were killed in service. Sometimes these are the only photos of the person that exist. Sometimes they are kept in a specific place — a particular drawer, a particular box, a particular envelope — that the family has handled with a kind of reverence for decades.

Those photos deserve the same treatment as any other: digitized, backed up, and shared with the family members who would want to know they exist. The grandniece who was named after a great-uncle killed in Korea may have never seen his face. Somewhere, in someone's house, that face exists. The case for getting it out of that one drawer and into a place where she can see it is the same case we've made before about why every family photo belongs to the whole family — except more so, because there are no new photos of this person coming. What exists is all there will ever be.

If the keeper of those photos is an older relative, asking gently this weekend whether you might make digital copies is also a kindness to them. Most of the time, the answer is yes. Most of the time, no one has ever asked.

If you've recently lost someone who served

If you're reading this in the first weeks or months after losing a parent, grandparent, or other relative who served, the photos are likely sitting somewhere in their house right now, and you may be the person who ends up with them. We've written a longer guide for the early weeks of inheriting a family's photos, and most of it applies here. But the specific service-related thing worth saying is this: do not throw away anything that looks military, even if you don't know what it is or who it shows.

Unit photos, base photos, photos of equipment, photos of people in uniform you don't recognize — these may seem unimportant. They are not. Even if no one in your immediate family can identify them, there are veterans' organizations, unit historical associations, and online communities for almost every American military unit going back to World War I that can often identify a photo from the patch, the equipment, or the background. Photos that look like nothing to you can be reunited with their context by someone who knows what they're looking at.

Hold onto everything until at least one person who knew the person well has had a chance to look through it.

The longer arc

Memorial Day will pass. The flags will come down. The cookouts will end. The photos will go back in the box, and life will go on.

The thing we'd ask you to think about, before this weekend ends, is what happens next year, and the year after that. Photos in a closet are still photos in a closet, no matter how meaningful they are. The people who could identify them are not getting younger. The photos themselves are not getting any newer.

If your family has any service photos at all, they deserve to be somewhere safer than where they are right now, and they deserve to be somewhere the rest of the family can actually see them. KinPhotos is built for exactly this — a private place where your family can collect its photos, preserve the stories that go with them, and make sure that the great-great-grandchildren of the people in those uniforms will still know their names.

But the platform matters less than the project. Whatever you do, do something. Even a phone photo and a five-minute voice memo this weekend is more preservation work than most families ever do.

The young person in the uniform in the closet did something hard, a long time ago, and somebody at the time thought it was worth taking a picture of. The least we can do, generations later, is make sure the picture — and the story — doesn't disappear.

This weekend is a good weekend to start.