Old NJ photos, an AI tool and the best Mother’s Day gift

I have two Sears photo album boxes sitting on a shelf. I inherited them when my parents passed away in the early 1990s. My brother Dean got the slides. I got the photos.

Old photos are funny things. They spend most of their lives in albums, in shoeboxes, on shelves — rarely looked at. Maybe on a rainy day. Maybe when someone passes. Maybe when you're in the mood to post one online. They sit there holding entire lives inside them and we walk past them without stopping.

Last week I stopped.

With Mother's Day coming up and a little curiosity about what AI can actually do, I had a random thought. What would happen if I colorized some of these old black and white photos? I had faded prints of my grandparents, Michael and Anna Camarata, from 1952. Photos of my parents, Pat and Carl Johnson, from the mid-1950s when my dad was home on leave from the Army — a few years before they got married in 1958.

I tried it. And it brought me to the threshold of tears.

There they were — all four of them — young, healthy, vibrant, full of life. My grandmother Anna in a leopard coat that could stop traffic, standing next to my grandfather Michael by a black Cadillac with whitewall tires on Weymouth Road in Mays Landing in Atlantic County. My parents smiling in the summer sun on Thompson Avenue in Pleasantville, my dad in a short sleeve shirt, my mom in a blue dress, the whole world still ahead of them.

I have color photos of all four of them from the 1970s and 1980s when they were older. I knew those versions of them. But seeing them young and alive and vivid in color — people I loved who have been gone for decades — did something to me I wasn't prepared for.

The building in the background tells the whole story

Look at the first photo carefully. Behind my grandparents on Weymouth Road, you can see the old Mays Landing cotton mill — which became Wheaton Plastics in 1949. That building connects every person in these photos.

My grandparents Michael and Anna lived directly across the street from it. My father Carl started working there in the 1950s and worked there into the early 1990s. My mother Pat worked there as a secretary before she had me, while she was pregnant with me, gave birth to me in 1962 and became a stay-at-home mom — and then went back to work there as a secretary again in the 1980s. Four people. One building. An entire South Jersey life contained in that single frame.

I drove past that building recently and took a photo. The factory is abandoned now. So is my grandparents' house across the street.

SEE ALSO: Before 1972 Mays Landing had no real pizza — and then a cousin arrived 

The cookie jar was always full

My grandmother lived a block away from us in Mays Landing. I would walk over and visit and she always had snacks ready. The cookie jar was always full. The RC Cola was always cold.

In the warmer months we would sit on her screened-in porch and watch the activity across the street at Wheatons. Workers coming and going. Shift changes. And sometimes we would see my dad walk by on his way in or out. We would just sit there and chit chat, my grandmother and me, watching the world move past on Weymouth Road.

I did not know then how much I would miss those afternoons.

Try it yourself

If you have old photos — and most of us do, in boxes and albums and tucked away in closets — I want to suggest you try colorizing them before Mother's Day this Sunday. There are several AI tools that will do it in seconds, free or nearly free. Just search "AI photo colorizer" and you will find them. Upload the photo. Watch what happens.

What comes back is not just a colorized image. It is a version of someone you loved that you have never quite seen before. Young and present and real in a way that the faded black and white never allowed.

My mother was kind and patient and she was gone too soon. My grandmother always had something waiting for me on that porch. Seeing them young again — even through a screen, even through an algorithm — felt like a gift I did not know I needed.

This Mother's Day, go find the shoebox.