With the new HP InkJet printer successfully installed, my week has been filled with printing pictures. The finished products are acceptable, having no lines on them (some printers make lines on the picture).?

I use HP premium glossy photo paper. Because the finished product looks good, I always try to purchase the same kind of paper.

With the printer comes the capability of scanning slides and negatives, which is all new to me and will be addressed at a later time. The problem facing me this week is dating the pictures and deciding which one of the four Stevens sons are in them.?

I strongly advocate?identifying everyone in a photograph, dating the photograph and describing the event.? If we know who the people are and when the picture was taken, then it certainly would make the genealogist's life easier when we have a pile of old photos.

Most of you have read my story about a couple of my relatives, who inherited pictures and, because they did not know any of the people, they threw all the pictures away.?A feeling of sadness comes over me every time I remember that story.?

My Stevens family has always been referred to as "my lost line;" however, I no longer can say that since my trip to West Virginia, where I met many members of that family.?

While visiting them, I made copies of old pictures using my digital camera.?One first cousin once removed?identified a picture I had in my possession as her father, Orval.?

My annotations were that it could be the two younger sons, Clyde or Orval, as I had not seen a picture of them.?All four sons were in the military -- three in the U.S. Army and one in the Marine Corps.?

The picture in question has three men in uniform; I know the one who is a Stevens, but wanted to be sure he was in an Army uniform. I received this picture by e-mail from a distant relative in Indiana, who did not identify its contents.

Stephanie had inherited all of her grandmother's pictures and had several with the names Esther, Clyde and Orville Stevens. She did not know how these cousins were related to her family as her grandmother was a Jackson.?

When I answered her query on GenForum, I told her that her great-grandmother was a Stevens who married a Jackson, and that the Stevens were her brother's children. These pictures have added so much to my Stevens family history.

My husband identified the?uniform as an Army uniform. I have decided the man in question is Joseph Earl Stevens who was in the Army until 1911.?

On the 1910 Missouri Census, he was listed in the Army at Jefferson Barracks which is in St. Louis.?On his induction papers he was described as being about 5 feet 7 inches tall. The man in the pictures was about that tall.?The only brother who would look like him was in the Marine Corps and was described as being tall.

Jennifer, my second cousin, is working on my copy of the Orval Stevens family history, which I should receive in a couple of weeks.?If they send copies of pictures, I trust them to have identified and dated them.?I am copying family pictures to share with them for Christmas.