Good going Noodles and Tiki!
liziness - "the old country" is Scotland or "back home" as my mum calls it. When her sister died 3 years ago she brought back a box of old photos and my Granny's china tea set and gave them to me. I made her cry last year at Christmas dinner as I had my Gran's brass candlesticks as the centrepiece on the dinner table and served tea and dessert on Gran's china. I think it was a mixture of sadness at my Gran being gone and happiness that the china that had sat in a closet for who knows how many years was finally being used.
Apparently this was my Gran's first set and only set of good china which my mum and aunt had bought for Gran as a gift when they first started working in their mid-teens. They had grown up very poor with my Gran raising 7 kids by herself during World War II and china was a luxury they couldn't afford. Photographs were also a thing of luxury that most people couldn't afford back then so that to me explains why there weren't too many photos of my family before the late 50's.
I do have a photo of one of my uncles in his WW II army uniform - fortunately he did make it through okay and came home.