There are ghosts in a box on the bookshelf in the second floor hall.

The people in the box look out with recrimination for having been forgotten. Despite having some connection to our ancestors and to us, their names are lost. Its the same with the photographs, some of them tintypes, sold by the box lot when estates are auctioned. The people in them are lost to history, lost to relatives who, if they only knew, would cherish them.

It’s impossible to look at such photos without contemplating mortality, which is much on the minds of many in these pandemic times.

The pictures in the box were taken by or given to my parents. The oldest go back to nearly the turn of the century. On a visit home, when my father was then in his late eighties, my brother and I brought the box out and asked my Dad to identify the people in the photos. We were too late. His memory was no longer up to the task. He was embarrassed. It was sad all around.

I discovered, during this downtime of social distancing and isolation, that I was repeating the error.

There are people in photos from my life, and not just the old class pictures from one grade or another, that neither I nor my partner of a half-century can name. “She looks so familiar. How could I have forgotten her name?”

The struggle to remember feels like wading through waist-deep snow. As I try to recall I wish that I had, like the Norse god Odin, Muninn, the raven of memory perched on my shoulder. Alas, all l could summon was the spirit of Poe’s raven, the one who croaked “Nevermore.”

This is a plea, for the sake of history and one’s descendants: Spend some of this plague-induced downtime opening the boxes and labeling their contents as best you can. Use a pen with permanent, acid-free ink. Technology has made it inexpensive to scan the photos and share the images with friends and relatives who might be able to I.D. some of them.

Ideally, family photos that exist only in hard copy as it were should be scanned and stored digitally as insurance against flood, fire, and time itself. The work is tedious but virtuous.

For a small fee, 25 cents or so a piece, companies like Scancafe will digitize photo collections which, after a few do-it-yourself hours of scanning, become an attractive option. Be sure to scan both the front and back of photos if they are labeled. And count yourself lucky if, while rummaging through drawers and boxes, you come across a time capsule, a roll or rolls of film. It can still be developed.

Open up a can of the past. To paraphrase Mississippi writer William Faulkner, the past isn’t over, isn’t dead, and isn’t even past. It’s just grown a bit murky from sitting, unattended, in a box.

(Ralph Jimenez lives in Concord and is a member of the Monitor’s editorial board.)