have been doing a bit of amateur archeology lately, digging deep, excavating through layers of an all-but-forgotten past. This process is sometimes painful as it causes me to review the awful fashion and haircut choices I made when I was growing up.

Digging through old family photos can cause a guy to become caught in a vortex of nostalgia.

What happened to that young, carefree boy who seemed to have the fashion sense of a hobo?

The kid who had an at-home haircut that appeared to involve a bowl placed on the head?

The happy-go-lucky lad who looked as concerned about his personal cleanliness as a pig in a mud puddle?

My mother left behind photo albums that were stuffed with pictures that were taken throughout the childhoods of my seven siblings and me. I have been sifting through the photos lately, categorizing them by the main person who is in each picture. The resulting collections of old photos are given to the corresponding siblings.

Each snapshot is a moment crystalized in time. Some photos are so old that they predate the advent of color photography. Or at least before anyone in our family could afford to buy rolls of color film.

A lot of the photos were taken randomly and showed their subjects in poses that were less than flattering. Others are poorly composed, sometimes with a thumb in the frame, sometimes with a person cut in half or missing the top part of their head. It’s difficult to believe that we lived under such primitive conditions that we lacked the ability to zoom or crop or to simply glance at a small electronic screen and say, “Oops, that wasn’t very good. Let’s try again.”

There are photos of 4-H steers being led by their owners and 4-H softball games. Snapshots of confirmations, graduations, and weddings. Pictures of newborns being welcomed into the family by being passed from person to person and thus exposed to our family’s unique microbial biome.

Some of the pictures included aunts and uncles, grandpas and grandmas. All of them are gone now, but they live on in the images and in our memories.

Mom kept some photos that date back to a time well before mine. There are several pictures of Mom’s cousins; none of them are labeled and I have no idea who those people were. Let this be a lesson: label or tag all your photos because you never know what some future person might want to know.

There are also monochrome portraits of my ancestors. Most of them were taken in photo studios; you can tell by the stiff poses and the printed curtain hanging in the background. Everyone is dressed in their Sunday best, and everybody has the expression that one might wear when facing a firing squad. Maybe they were afraid that the camera was going to steal their souls.

Distributing the envelopes of pictures to my siblings has been enjoyable. My sisters will invariably comment, “Oh my God, look at my hair!” or “I remember that outfit.” Neither of my brothers has commented about remembering his clothing or hairdo. Although one of my brothers noted, “Look at how dirty we were.”

That is true. Growing up on a small dairy farm meant daily contact will all manner of grit and grime. We played in the meltwater puddles on the driveway and made mud pies. We might clean ourselves by rinsing off in the stock tank, which was rife with cow saliva, algae, and water bugs. But at least we looked cleaner.

King, our erstwhile German Shepherd pooch, appears in one black-and-white photo. He was an odd dog. He would leap up and grab a low tree branch with his jaws and hang by his teeth, whining with excitement. If you tossed a pebble, King would run after it and pick it up. He never brought the pebble back. Perhaps he was building a secret collection.

If a pebble “happened” to land in a puddle, King would plunge his snout into the murky water and search enthusiastically, twin streams of bubbles percolating from his nostrils. He never failed to come up with a pebble. It may not have been the tossed one, but he didn’t seem to care. King would invariably trot off with his prize, holding his head high in victory.

One of my favorite snapshots features all eight of us kids. We’re standing by the rear bumper of our 1959 Ford station wagon on an early spring day in 1968. Our futures are still ahead of us and everyone we loved was still alive.

And despite the mud and meltwater, we are all remarkably clean.

— Jerry’s book, “Dear County Agent Guy” can be found at www.workman.com and in bookstores nationwide.