Family Memories- Make Them, Collect Them & Share Them

Make Them
Record your memories today. This is an unprecedented time in our country’s history. Write a journal of what is happening today, what you feel like, what the stores, government, health care, you name it…what is it like. Document your struggles and joys of these times so that others will be able to read about our experiences. Ask your kids and parents to write their feelings as well. Tell about what you did for school at home and work from home and entertainment at home. Kids could draw pictures of how they feel and what they are doing and what the world is like now. Record your memories of today with your phone, tablet, with journaling and with drawing.

Collect Them & Share Them
You have extra time like you’ve never had it before…seize the opportunity.  Collect together all your old media that contains all your family memories. Collect your video tapes, movie films, pile up your loose photos, stacks of family photo albums, and collect all of your memory cards, flash drives, external drives, old phones. Gather up all the old audio including (records, cassettes, reel-to-reel, microcassettes, 8-tracks and more).  It’s a great time to go through the old tubs and boxes.  You can get the kids involved in all the sorting.  You can either bring them in to be digitized now (Leave A Legacy is still open) or just get them ready to digitize when things settle down.

Getting photos off your iphone can be a challenge so we wrote up an instruction sheet to help you back up and download the photos so that you can use them. This is a great time to work on backing up all the photos on your phone or social media. Here is a link to our blog about getting the photos from your iphone.

Another aspect of collecting memories is to do some interviews with your parents or grandparents.  Life is all too short and can end unexpectantly.  Many a person has regret of all the questions they didn’t ask a family member before they passed.  I myself, wish I had gone through all the family history research my mother compiled with her before she passed.  Seize the opportunity today. Ask the questions about your family history while you still have them.  There are books available that will help you come up with questions to ask.  Both of my parents completed such books and they contain lots of treasures. After they passed I scanned both of the books which has their hand-written responses and typed up my father’s responses since his handwriting is a challenge to decipher. I then printed and bound copies of their writing and the transcription and gave copies to my brother and my kids.  Have your kids call your parents and have your parents tell them stories of their youth. Sharing family memories will help both your parents and your children pass the time.

Recent projects:
Some clients are having us create books of the photos that we digitized for them in the past. I will send her proofs online.  Another client is coming in today to use our VCR and video cameras to sift through her videos to see which ones she wants digitized.

Linda brought in a reel-to-reel of her high school recital of her playing the piano.  We also finished rebinding a liturgy book for St. Catherine’s Church.  That one was a special book that had a gold metal front and back covers but the spine was totally falling apart.  It is all renewed now and will be ready for the priest to use at services once they resume.

Another client brought in 4 old oval photos to be scanned and restored. I thought the results were astounding.

I had 2 clients who were already sifting through their video collections and brought them in yesterday to have us digitize. That will keep us busy for a few days.