I was cleaning out an old chest in one of my closets at home in Philadelphia when I came across a treasure I thought I had lost: century-old photos of my mother and her familywhen she was a child. These are mostly sepia-colored pictures taken by professional photographers rather than the more portable box-shaped Brownies used to record my own early childhood in the 1940s. Rarely did people smile in those early photos because they took so long to expose the film and everyone had to stay perfectly still. Everyday color photography was decades away.