This is a very silly tangent, but it's actually remarkable how early cameras became an economical (albeit slightly luxurious) way to preserve personal histories: I have pictures of ancestors from the 1870s and 1880s, despite living in a one horse shtetl in the middle of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

The Kodak Brownie[1] was arguably the first "mass market" camera, and it's 122 years old this year.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_Brownie