My poor ma in law has dementia too. We had to move her out of her house up North and into a home, and later into another nearer to us. We collared most of the paper stuff before the house was sold, and we have found the usual stuff but also some treasures.

She led quite a peripatetic life as her then husband was a surveyor/architect who always had itchy feet. So she found herself in Newcastle on Tyne, in Aden with two small girls, in Oxfordshire with USAF friends who owned big GM iron, and in various parts of Herts and Cambridgeshire.

I have been scanning PILES of old photos including some amazing colour prints from Aden, lots of shots from a marathon trip to the South of France via Lausanne (!) and holidays in Spain before mass tourism. They are absolutely fascinating. And they drive me mad, as dad in law was a serial purchaser and borrower of rubbish cameras using weird and wonderful film sizes. Needless to say it's an enormous job just scanning 'em never mind identifying them.

Ma in law did some O levels in the late Seventies so we also have some excellent little English pieces which fill in the gaps in the photos. A story about the aforementioned marathon to Frejus via Lausanne in a Volkswagen Beetle is totally hair raising. She spent hours at night in the Alps pinching her husband's arm to keep him awake and on the correct side of the road!

Anyway it's all worth it. We did manage to jog her memory with some of the stuff in the early stages but I'm afraid it's pointless now. However it shines a bright light on family history, particularly the dominant and pig headed Great North Eastern English Male!