Monday, April 14, 2014

Digitizing the past

At the end of the Blue Bloods episode from Friday April 11, The family is watching some home movies that Erin had digitized. They were doing some reconnecting with what is important in the family. At our house, on Saturday, we watched a dance recital from 1989 and also did some of that reconnecting.

I am turning dance recitals, a high school production, middle school band, and some home movies into digital content. I have watched most of it as I'm dubbing it over the first time. After that, for the additional copies, I am not watching again. It has been a trip down memory lane.

My daughter realized that her daughter shares many of her characteristics. Although the dance video isn't high quality, she is usually easy to pick out. When she watched the first one, she realized that her daughter could have made some of the hand gestures. I noticed that too when I was searching for the numbers she was in. I had missed one of the numbers because it seems she is in two acrobat numbers which I hadn't expected. Watching it together was a lot of fun.

New digital technologies let us store our tangible evidence of activities much longer. My niece and I are going to be scanning a bunch of family photos. Since my office is so cool all year, I plan to do mine all summer. After scanning them, I am adding in names and dates, where available. Then we're uploading to dropbox where we can share them. Some will also make it into blogs and Facebook.

My aunt has been a scrapbooker most of her life. She has wonderful scrapbooks full of her family history. I hope we can add that to our digital collection. I have some in scrapbooks, but mostly, I have photos and programs that are confined in a couple of boxes.

I look forward to spending the time with these memories and then sharing them with family members who are interested. I am grateful for technology that lets us capture these for the future. To my mind, that is what all families need.

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