A faded photograph can leave expressions clear after the names have become uncertain.

Photographs lose their labels long before they lose their faces. Two generations on, nobody is sure which sister is which, and yet the expressions are perfectly legible: someone amused, someone impatient, someone standing slightly apart. What survives is the human part rather than the identifying part, which is the reverse of what an archive would prefer. It still tells you something true about a family, just not who.

Write names on the back of the pictures you have, now, while somebody still knows them. And when you look at ones already past that point, let the faces be worth looking at even where the names have gone.