Nolan Pelletier of Connecticut, USA, has one of my favorite streams on Flickr, the owls go. It’s a collection of found photos and slides picked up at estate and garage sales – odd, poignant, charming, and adorable images of strangers from eras past.

Here, Nolan offers a few home movies his picked up in his collecting travels. Because they’re found films, details can often be hard to come by, but Nolan offers a description of this particular gem:

This film is from the estate of a family who lived only 2 or 3 minutes from my house. It’s very odd to see the neighborhood they lived in 50 years ago. From what I can gather, this film was taken by the mother. She worked for the American School for the Deaf, and these were taken there. There are several reels of footage of all the children gathered for different occasions. They were all taken in the mid to late 1960s. I would love to know where these kids are today. They’re all pretty adorable.

The American School for the Deaf was founded in 1817 and is based in West Hartford, Connecticut. Students there also made this quite interesting website, Deaf is….

This post is among the last new entries Lost in Light will be making, as we prepare to retire the project. It’s been a wonderful year and a half, but our lives beckon us toward other projects. The site will remain up and complete as an archive of all these wonderful films we have collected. thanks to everyone who has participated in this labor of love.

In this film full of delicious looking food, our contributor Ashima turns one year old. She tells us more:

My 1st year birthday party (1969) in Albany Village which is student housing in Berkeley, CA. My father was working on his PhD at UC-Berkeley (Industrial Engineering).

This was a typical Indian gathering, outside and with lots of food. Mama made a lot of the Indian food, but she got the cake and sandwiches catered. There were probably 30+ people in attendance.

There is a man holding me whose name is Russ. He was friends with my Leo Uncle. Leo and Ruth were two individuals who became like my Papa and Mama’s second parents in the US. We always had Easter and Thanksgiving with them when we lived in CA.

Anyway, Mama is wearing a sari that Papa gave her as a wedding gift. She still owns it! The two older girls are Raman (who lives in Detroit now) and Sunaina (not sure where she is now). Then, the other two babies I’m sitting with her friends I used to play with a lot. Mama couldn’t remember their names. The blue outfit I am wearing was sent to my Mama by her Mama. Ruth Auntie and my mama found the tights at a dime store called Kresge.

Interestingly, the Kresge dime store was the forerunner to the modern Kmart. Here are some fantastic recordings of the in-store background music to truly put you back in the 1960s Kresge experience. Read more about the history of the Kresge and Kmart stores here. And the Kresge Foundation website is here.

Click “MPEG-2″ above for a high resolution version of this film and more from Ashima at the Internet Archive.

This week, a charming film from Susan S. from Galveston, Texas, in the 1950s. It’s all about the reactions to those boots! From Susan:

I remember having those red boots! Funny how you remember certain things! Also, I can tell from the wallpaper and a pink rose vase on the table behind me, that we are my grandparents house, Henry and Lillian Schultz, on 49th street in Galveston, Texas. Must have been my 4th birthday so it’s 1953. That is my 1st cousin, Zeb, in the bow tie, and my brother , Stephen, in the high chair. Also in the film is my very handsome Dad Carter Shirey, and my grandparents, paternal grandmother, aunt and uncle. Mother, Betty Shirey, is sitting next to me and helping me unwrap presents. I can’t think of who might be taking the pictures since the whole family is in the film! My grandparents lived in that house until I was 16 – it was built on stilts like most of the houses in Galveston after the storm of 1900.

A reminder that we’re now showing films without sound to more accurately present them in their original form. High-quality raw footage of this film and more is downloadable from the Internet Archive. Click the “MPEG-2″ link above.