I started work on another box- this one isn't going to be as easy, because it's not filled with photo albums with dates on the front like the first one I worked on was. It's mostly scattered photographs in packets from photo development shops.

The bulk of the photos I've run across in this box are from the late 1990's into about 2004, although I did find photos from 1988-1990.

That was interesting for me, because I started hanging out around downtown Newark/The University of Delaware area in the late 1990's/early 2000's, so I was seeing a lot of familiar old sights there. One photo I really loved was of Rainbow Records- it's an indie record shop that had been really popular, to the point that they had moved into a nearby building as part of a big expansion. In latter years, the store had moved back to it's original space, and then eventually moved to an even smaller space in what had once been the store's back offices. It's been barely hanging on, but it's still there- just in a much smaller space. So the photo of what the store looked like it in the glory days of CD's before MP3's became common was pretty cool to see.

I had to do a lot of "dating" clues when it came to the photographs. One that helped was Gore Hall, which was built on campus in 1998. So if I saw a photo of ROTC kids marching on camps and they passed by Gore, I knew the photo had to have been from post-1998. Another interesting clue I had was a picture of these children who were at the parade- one little girl had a shirt on that said, "04", which suggested 2004 to me. I remember when it was particularly trendy at that point in the decade to have shirts that said the year on it. Then there was Cafe Gelatto's, the fancy schmancy Italian restuarant that had been around since 2000, where I would get Gelatto since I was in high school. My favorite clue though, was when I'd see photos with Mayor Vance Funk (who became mayor of Newark in 2003), and Ruth Ann Minner, who had been Delaware governor from 2001 to 2009. So having those two in the parade would definitely point to a 2004-ish time period for those particular set of photos.