Does anyone look at old photos and feel really homesick?

[ReallySpicyCurry2]

I don't mean old photos of oneself necessarily. I don't know how else to describe it. DH doesn't get what I mean at all. But for instance, I am on a local history page, and someone posted an old photo from 1890 of children waking in a city park. I don't know the park (just the vague area) or anything like that, but I got this physical tug of homesick longing just looking at it.

I've always had it, ever since I was a child. I don't necessarily think it's to do with the particular time or place (though it does happen more frequently with anything late Victorian) if I were to narrow it down, I would say perhaps it occurs mostly with photos where people are just going about their daily lives, doing nothing in particular. Yet they're dead and gone, and everything about that time is gone, and now nobody remembers or knows what it was like to be there.

Does anyone know what I mean?

Isn't that nostalgia, rather than homesickness?

No I don't think so, it's definitely homesickness. Nostalgia, to me, is more enjoyable, and about reminiscing - this isn't. It's uncomfortable like homesickness.

I thought that feeling comes from when you're not happy where you are and who you're with.

Are you happy?

Something like this sort of nostalgia?

m.youtube.com/watch?v=suRDUFpsHus

Yes. I was at the crematorium today for a walk and so sad to see memorial benches to three or even four generations. And the most recently deceased would never even have met the longest gone generation who died in 1900 or so. Looked at my own nan's plaque she has been gone 27 years and when I die no one at all will remember her.

Yes, apart from the usual lockdown crap I'm very happy, and have been for a few years now- probably the most I've ever been. And it's something I've had since I was a child. In a sense it doesn't feel personal to me necessarily - more the fact that something is gone forever. Ways of life. People who were similar to how we are now, but then again, weren't.

I've always been pretty interested in history, and perhaps it's related to that - I've read and watched so much but can never really touch it, not properly. Whereas if you had a dream place to go on holiday, chances are you could make it happen somehow - or at least believe that one day you could.

It's not homesickness I don't think as that means missing your home.

I know what you mean I feel really melancholy when I look at old photos. People with their lives ahead of them now they're long gone. It makes me wonder who will be looking at our photos in years to come.

I've just been googling all the places I lived as a child, as an RAF child I moved a hell of a lot. I've lived abroad for over 20 years and have never felt the pull to go back to the UK, until now with Covid restrictions meaning I cannot see my family. I've spent the past couple of hours bawling

It also made me feel very very old (I'm only 45!) so double whammy!

I know exactly what you mean. I feel it too and love looking at old photos despite the feeling.
I have always said that if I could have any super power, it would be to be able to travel back in time and observe all of these times first hand. I wouldn't necessarily want to interact with them, just be there. 😊

The pain of lost place. I feel this all the time. It is the sense of loss, and the impossibility of returning.

There’s a paragraph at the start of The pursuit of love about there being nothing so sad as old photographs. Click and the moment is captured like a fly in amber and life marches on. Or something.

OP I deal with this feeling by working through my family tree, I have found lost relatives through dna, and connections with places that I felt but had no idea that I had ancestral connections to. Perhaps that might be something you might enjoy ?

@PicsInRed I've never watched Mad Men but I was shown that clip on a training course once. It absolutely blew me away.

Well perhaps use your feelings of nostalgia to explore the past and write about it. Who knows what could come from that. Maybe a best selling book or podcast or something.