Tag: photos

Tips on preserving family memories

I’m presenting a class for a family history workshop on how to preserve various family memories: audio, video, documents, and photos. I thought some of my friends online might appreciate the information I’m sharing, so here are the basics:

Video

You can use a service to transfer film or VHS/Beta tapes to DVDs or do it yourself. Services are certainly easier but they’re costly.

First, the services I’ve found: Mail your materials in to MyMovieTransfer.com, ScanCafe.com, DigMyPics.com, iMemories.com, LegacyBox.com, or YesVideo.com.

Or go to Costco, Walmart, Walgreens, or CVS (these all use YesVideo service) to drop off your videos for transfer.

Next, DIY methods:

For VHS tapes, you can use a VHS-DVD burner combo player, an analog-to-digital adapter for your computer, or a separate VHS player and DVD recorder. These require various levels of know-how and equipment that might be pricey, but it might be cheaper even with pricey equipment if you have a lot to transfer. Plus, you can re-sell the equipment when you’re done to recoup some of the costs.

Digital Trends provides a nice online tutorial for DIY methods.

Once you’re finished getting your video onto DVD, then you can move on to getting it onto your computer hard drive in MP4 or similar format. For the future, it looks as if everything is going digital, so just go ahead and do it now. This also means you can have all your memories in one place. You can store on your computer and also keep a copy on a backup hard drive for safekeeping, along with all of your other digital copies of photos and audio, etc. I’ve used Xilisoft’s DVD Ripper and it’s fairly simple if you have some computer experience; standard version is $39.99. Other software includes Wondershare Video Converter starting at $39.95.

Digital Trends provides instructions for some free options.

Audio

Transferring cassette tapes onto your computer hard drive and into MP3 or similar digital audio formats is less complex than transferring video. It’s also pretty inexpensive. You just need a cassette player and an auxiliary cord to plug it into your computer, as well as software. The primary software I’ve seen (and used myself) is Audacity. Bonus: it’s free! Here are a couple of online tutorials:

http://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-turn-a-cassette-tape-into-mp3s/

http://www.wikihow.com/Transfer-Cassette-Tape-to-Computer

Photos

If you have photos in slide format, you can use a service, which can be quite expensive if you have a lot of them, or you can do it yourself. DIY is pretty easy and just requires a slide scanner, which can be purchased for around $80 to $120.

Loose photos or photos in albums are easy to scan with a regular scanner. Many of us now have combo printer/scanners. If you don’t have one yet, you can purchase a good-quality one for as little as $50. Only drawback is it’s time-consuming. If you’re trying to scan in photos that are still in old albums, you’ll have to scan in each page, make copies of the image on your computer, then crop down to each photo. Afterward, you can use your favorite photo-editing software to clean them up.

There are also apps for this project, such as Pic Scanner, which can be downloaded from the iTunes app store. It’s free for the first 10 scans of album pages and $2.99 after that. Pros: Makes it easy to just “take a picture,” and it isolates the separate photos for you without you having to copy and crop. Con: I liked the quality of my scanner better.

If you do want to use a service, there are lots out there, such as ScanCafe.com, DigMyPics.com, FotoBridge.com, iMemories.com, LegacyBox.com, and YesVideo.com.

Documents

Don’t forget to scan in old family documents as well. Same process goes here for photos. Use a scanner.

Now, going the other direction: many of us have photos from the past 5 to 10 years strictly in digital format. That’s great for storage, but you’ll also want to have some actually in hard copy form. I’ve found it’s nice and pretty easy to make photo albums on my computer using various photo-album services and then just have them printed and bound for me. No printing of individual photos and then assembling into albums. I’ve used Shutterfly, MiniBox, and MyPublisher and have been satisfied with their products. There are also a number of other services I haven’t tried: PhotoBook America, Peggy Bank, and AdoramaPix, for a few examples.

Deals

If you’re going to do any of these projects with services available, make sure you get the best deal you can! Groupon and LivingSocial are handy for this. Sign up for their emails and you’ll get heads-up on the various deals that might involve these kinds of services. I’ve gotten good ones from MyPublisher and am up to date on all my family photo albums thanks to them.

I also like to use Ebates to get cash back and coupons for services. Create an account and you can search for all their participating merchants.

Some current deals (local to my area in California):

ScanMyPhotos.com

Digital media services from Southtree

Video and image digitization services from Peggy Bank 

Groupon for 40-page photo books from PhotoBookAmerica

Groupon for photo books from AdoramaPix

 

Honoring my father from afar

My dad has been dead for 2 1/2 years, which makes this my third Father’s Day without him, I guess. After this kind of time has passed, I can walk past the Father’s Day card display at the store without crying, which is nice. I don’t think I’ll ever walk past it without thinking of him, though.

Dad died suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of 71. It tore my heart out to lose him like that. I think about him every day and miss all kinds of different things about him. We spent a lot of time together, so not having him around is strange. That space he filled in my life, which was a pretty big one, is still empty. Nothing else and no one else has seeped in to fill in any of that gap. It’s still a hole. But, again, thanks to the passing of time, it’s a hole that generally doesn’t leave me gasping and crying about anymore. It’s one I notice and think about; the hole now reminds me of all that used to fill it. I just think about all the things we did together, all we had in common, and all we would talk about.

As a mother, I understand pretty well how my mom felt years ago when she was a stay-at-home mom to three kids. I know exactly why she had to get us out of the house sometimes to JUST BE ALONE, for crying out loud. But what’s funny now is that because she sent my dad out with us kids to give her some quiet time, I now have all kinds of great memories of spending time with Dad. In her efforts to get us out of her hair, she gave us a gift.

Dad took us all kinds of places. We never lived in any big towns, mainly rural areas, so there probably wasn’t a lot to choose from in the way of cool ready-made activities, but my dad found the seeds of treasured memories. He took us to a nature preserve we just called “the deer park,” near Penn State’s Beaver Stadium.

My dad took this picture of me and my little sister at the “deer farm” during one of our many trips there.

It was this wonderful wooded area that had a large fenced-off area within the trees that was dotted with deer. Mom would give us some supplies from our food storage, and off we’d go to stick our hands inside the fence and feed the deer some dried corn or wheat or something. We’d feel the roughness of their tongues as they licked the food right off our palms. In my memory, the area seemed quite large; walking around the whole perimeter was a long distance. There’s no telling how big it really was, but it still seems vast to me inside my head.

Dad also took us to little local museums and to parks and creeks. On one trip to a creek, he took some photos that document forever how he put my little sister’s bikini top on upside down. He took lots of photos, which he developed as slides. So we don’t have family albums; we have boxes full of slide trays. I even have good memories of sitting with our family in the quiet and dark of an evening watching the slides. I can hear the whir of the fan on the old slide projector and smell its mechanical smell as I think about it now, even.

All those rural areas gave us so many places to roam and play. We lived in Pennsylvania, where there was plenty of snow. Dad would take us sledding, steering us on our big Flexible Flyer down hills packed with snow. It was wonderful. We would also go on walks, hiking around through the woods and lanes where we lived on farms, observing and talking. He took pictures of those times, too.

Dad took this picture of me on a path near where we lived in rural Pennsylvania. I loved it there. Dad was very pleased with how this photo turned out. I like it too, except for 1) he’s not in it too and 2) my hair is hideously chopped off. Ah, well.

I could go on and on about all the memories I have of Dad, but it would take up a book, and it would probably bore you. What’s important is that I have memories to treasure. Now that he’s gone and I won’t see him for a while, I can pick those little gems out of my mind and browse them at my leisure, keeping myself company with what we had together while I wait to see him again. It’s Father’s Day today, and I remember him and honor his memory. But every single day he’s gone is just another opportunity for me to think back, to treasure those memories, and to thank him within myself for what he left behind. And Mom, thanks for making him leave the house with us.