Charles and Catherine Waggoner were real amateur photographers on their homestead in rural Ohio and captured not only the stiffly posed portraits typical of the early 20th century, but also more spontaneous moments.

Using a wooden, boxy Kodak camera that took postcard-sized cassettes, the couple made dozens of glass negatives of their relatives on the family farm in Findlay. For decades, they gathered dust in the farmhouse built by the family patriarch and Charles’ grandfather, William Waggoner.

Without Jeanne Bender of Buffalo Township, these artifacts of rural life would have been lost at the turn of the 20th century.

“I would probably describe my grandfather Charles as a technology junkie of 1906,” said Bender, 78, as she stood next to a selection of those photos compiled with help from the New Kensington Camera Club.

The exhibit is on display at the Focus on the Arts Gallery in Pittsburgh Mills Mall, and features paintings from 1906 to 1916, as well as the antique camera. The gallery is open Fridays from 5 to 8 p.m. and Saturdays from noon to 5 p.m. This weekend, however, is the last chance to see the exhibit, as it only runs through August, when the club’s lease ends.

Focus on the Arts may reopen later this year at a location to be announced.

Bender, whose maiden name is Waggoner, lived on the family farm until she married in 1968. Her husband, John, was drafted into the Air Force during the Vietnam War as a precision photoprocessor, deciphering aerial photographs behind enemy lines.

The original farmhouse was demolished in the late 1990s, but the land remained in the family. Bender owns half of the 40-acre property and leases it to farmers.

As a teenager, Bender played around with the old Kodak, but it would be decades before she discovered the 67 negatives that came with it. Then, in January, she met Tom Bista, a founding member of the camera club, who put her in touch with its first president, Donald Henderson.

Henderson, a lover of classic photography, set to work digitizing each negative. Most of the 25 images Bender selected for the exhibition are remarkably clear, but none of them are retouched. For Henderson, it was a slam dunk.

“So much of this stuff gets thrown away,” he said. “People don’t know what they have.”

Each one contains a snippet from a time long past and brings Bender closer to her family history than ever before.

One photo shows Bender’s aunt Ruth Waggoner as a small child, sitting in a wicker chair, wearing a dark, puffy dress and staring seriously into the camera. Another shows Ruth Waggoner’s mother Catherine at a piano that Bender now owns and on which her son took lessons.

“Some of these images make me feel like I’m back in the 20th century,” Bender said.

Not every photograph is perfect. Some of them have white spots caused by light leaks during shooting or the development process, reflecting the challenges early photographers faced.

There were some people she was unable to identify despite her research and the use of a family register. But for the most part, this was an exercise in getting to know her family better, including the people behind the clunky, unwieldy camera that was once considered a state-of-the-art camera.

Bender barely knew her grandparents. Charles Waggoner died in 1943 and Catherine Waggoner died in 1947, a year after Bender’s birth.

“It’s like I really know her now,” Bender said.