Preserving Your Family's Photography

Every family has them.  Boxes of old, yellowing, crumbling photographs.  And in quite a few of these old boxes are photographs in which there are people no one in the family remembers. The information has been lost as older family members pass on.

Decades ago, most families kept old photographs in picture albums and knew who the individuals were and what events were portrayed. But since the advent of digital photography, old albums have gone by the wayside.

We, at Reel DocuMemoirs, suggest that the best way to preserve your family story for future generations is to digitize your photographs.  It can be done with some of the oldest family members present who might have memories tied to the photographs.  The information they give can sometimes turn an old photograph of unknown individuals in 1910 into a photograph of Great Aunt Rosie and Great Uncle Manny on their wedding day, four generations ago.

And once they’re digitized, they can be shared between members of the extended family, some of whom can shed light on some of the unknown people and events in those photographs.  We have had great success coming up with information for our clients using this technique.

If you’re handy with a video camera, it might be fun to film the oldest family members talking about their memories of the people and events depicted in the photographs as they go through them. This way, you’ll be able to pass down those family memories in the best way possible-by those who were actually there.

At Reel DocuMemoirs we’ve been able to incorporate old videos and cassette audiotapes of ancestors long gone into our family history video documentaries. There’s nothing like the joy of recognition on the faces of today’s family members when they see or hear Grandpa Tom for the first time in decades. In their minds, he’s lived only in memory since he passed on. But for the youngest members of the family who have only heard mentions of Grandpa Tom, seeing and hearing him for the first time provides a connection to the past they will never forget!

Preserve Your Past...Inspire the Future with Reel DocuMemoirs!

How We Did It

To create our family history documentary video “In Search Of Grandma”, we began by researching our family history. Taking the stories we already knew, we backtracked via ancestry.com and other archival sources as far back as the 1790’s.  This led to some interesting discoveries about my family’s ancestors, as well as contacts all over the world with distant relatives we had never met before.

Then my brother, sister, mother and I videotaped many hours of discussions of our family history before two cameras. One of them was used for wide shots of the four of us. The other was for close-ups of us individually.

In the studio I wove our on-camera discussions together with our family photographs, documents, tied together with some narration, mixed together with appropriate music tracks to create a definitive family history documentary video. We focused especially on my Grandmother and her role in making our family what it is today.

During this time, I upgraded my studio’s facilities for this project, using the video editing program Final Cut on my upgraded iMac to accommodate the complexities of documentary filmmaking. 

Creating “In Search Of Grandma” took three months of intensive editing. Every week I burned a DVD copy of what was completed up till then to view on a large screen television with top of the line surround sound to view critically to see what changes I needed to make. As the project got closer to completion, we planned to premiere “In Search Of Grandma” in front of the entire family, including relatives from all over the world, at my mother’s 90^th birthday party.

Next: The Premiere of “In Search Of Grandma”