Family Archives

Every family needs a historian. Most families had at least one in the past; they were often simply good story tellers. The stories of long gone relatives lived on in tall tales of humor, courage, hardship and accomplishment passed from an elder to a younger.

Story telling is no longer a common pastime, or to more accurate, a potential story teller is no longer given enough time to be listened to. Children have televisions, computers, and music players for entertainment and keeping them interested with a story is not an easy proposition. The popularity of Twitter is telling of the A.D.D. times we live in. Serious (or significant) uses for that service do exist, however a recent study of the overall content determined that about 70% of all “tweets” were meaningless drivel. There is not much room for a good story in 140 characters!

If children don’t hear the family stories, many times over, they won’t be able to tell them as adults. They may not find a story entertaining enough to actually pay attention. Nobody likes to tell a story to someone that doesn’t want to listen or can’t sit still long enough to at least pretend they are listening so the story teller’s development is hampered. My own family has a habit of simultaneous talking and interrupting such that if I am damn-well determined to tell a story (exceeding 140 characters), I do so by making a toast at a family dinner and holding the floor like a filibuster. The chain of family story telling is rather fragile in a culture saturated with information and electronic media.

But put the story on your TV and attention spans are likely to increase dramatically. Not just for young people either! Today’s family historians may need to become savvy enough to compose the stories in a modern format.

Ironically this is not that hard to do and the process itself can be a moving experience for the new-media story teller. Even simple results can be powerful for all family members, young and old. But first the story teller may need to become an archivist to collect, organize and prepare the family history in words and imagery.

The organization and content of Capture the Past will hopefully evolve to become a useful resource for the aspiring family historian as well as a vehicle for sharing discoveries and debating best practices.

This site is rather new as of this writing so please feel free to post a relevant comment and help get things rolling.

iMemories Media Gallery

Ironically, newer media such as video tape is likely to degrade at a faster rate than old film! People with a library of family videos on VCR cassettes are almost certainly losing image quality not to mention the obsolescence of the venerable VCR itself.

iMemories Editing Area

1. Open a free account with iMemories.
2. Send them your original films, photographs, or tapes.
3. Pay for what you want digitized based upon a quote they will provide following receipt of your materials.
4. Await the results of the digitization.
5. Edit your materials into a finished state and order DVDs of the results if desired.
6. The originals will be returned via FedEx.
7. Purchase a hard drive and get the high-res versions sent to you if desired.

Preserve and protect family moments
Transform old photos and videos to digital with iMemories.
20% off at www.imemories.com

Moving Up to the Front

The house sat for too long with us dabbling here and there at a clean-out. Finally the clean-out became a necessity and the project took on a routine of devoting several hours every other day to going through all of the stuff. Dumpsters were filled and storage units were filled but the process dragged on. Friends who saw that I was tiring of the process suggested that I just hire a few people to go in and take care of it all at once. It was tempting but I had a sense that I would miss something important and never know.

One day I decided to tackle the garage. Old ski equipment, snow tires and piles of junk were slowly attended to. My back was killing me and the piles didn’t seem to be getting small enough. I began to regret not following that advice and just have the place “taken care of”.

Then I started to pull apart a pile of junk along a side wall. It really was a pile of junk and one thing after another went into the dumpster until the last box at the very bottom … somewhat damp and smelling of mildew. It was filled with letters, and some pictures, written from our father to our mother from towns and cities in France and Germany as the 4th Infantry Division pushed forward from Utah Beach on D-Day in 1944.

Somewhere in France 1945

This was the moment I had been concerned about. Nobody else would likely have bothered to inspect that stinky box at the bottom of a pile of other stinky boxes that contained nothing of value. I almost didn’t look at it carefully myself and this was one place I would never have expected to find a family treasure. Our garage was never used to store boxes of papers of any kind. How that ended up there is a total mystery. It was sitting there awaiting discovery, deterioration or the dumpster for many years.

Other posts will describe strategies for dealing with sudden and impressive discoveries such as this but of course I had to read a few letters. The first one contained an emphatic request to stop sending him cigarettes! Not that he didn’t smoke at the time but because it was one commodity that the military provided in more than sufficient quantities. He wanted harder-to-get things to be sent instead … like warm gloves and film for his camera.

No Longer Made

My family’s summer home is quite old and has thus far survived as a shared family possession through three generations. Drawers and closets contain many treasures but our medicine cabinets have always served as storage locations for historic memorabilia. They have accumulated the daily personal products of many people for over 70 years and no familiy member has ever decided this was an unacceptable practice.

An old tin of Prickly Heat Powder from the 1040′s comfortably shares cabinet space with a new tube of toothpaste. We all know very well which are the items to be used and which are simply former necessities, now past their expiration dates and older than all of us.

But of course we have house guests and not all people understand this practice. Some “clean freak” guests probably open an old medicine cabinet out of typical secretive curiosity and make a ghastly face of disgust but close the door thinking, “thank god that’s not my problem!” But they close the door and move on, leaving our treasures in place.

When Bottles were Bottles

She had a plan to solve this deadlock for us and go through all of the bathroom cabinets with an eye to keeping only what was good and proper for current use. Thankfully, while terribly misguided, she was also well mannered. This undertaking was proposed to us over breakfast, apparently after being discouraged by finding tampons in one of the cabinets that dated back to the first invention of tampons.

“NO NO NO! Don’t throw ANYTHING out from those cabinets!!!” was an immediate and simultaneous chorus from family members. Our sudden and obvious outrage was no doubt shocking and likely hurt her feelings which was as unintended as her desire to do anything but be a very helpful guest. Ironically, as a family, we had never voiced any shared passion for the contents of those cabinets, it was a completely silent understanding. A somewhat bizarre 70 year collection of personal hygiene products allowed to accumulate by mutual consent.

Sweet Pea Talcum

Our guests are welcome to look and marvel at the old stuff inside but the aspirin definitely could be as old as it looks and they have not sold mouthwash in glass bottles for some time … consider it all toxic, even if not marked as such, but highly valued. Please ask if in need of anything and one of the curators will make sure it is safe for contemporary use.

I am including WordPress as a viable option for presenting your family history as well as using it to assist with accumulation of information and imagery from other family members. For a technically savvy family historian with a large family that is geographically spread out, it allows you to build an attractive and functional content management system.

Remember, this is for the more technically inclined. Otherwise, a considerable amount of effort will be consumed making the presentation and/or information collection process work. There are also various services available that can be used to yield similar results, though much less customizable, such as Facebook, MobileMe, etc.

Here are some of the standard WordPress capabilities that could be very useful in presenting, interacting and acquiring family history information (including images, audio and movies).

• The commenting system is built in so a running dialog can be associated with any particular topic that is created.
• You can password protect any particular page or post on a case by case basis.
• You can require “members” to login and optionally keep the whole system private.
• Members can be given different levels of access to allow a certain people to create content while limiting the abilities of other members.
• Members can be given the ability to upload files and make them available for all members to see.
• There thousands of plugins (many excellent ones are free) to enhance the basic features of the system.
• There are many nice ways to display galleries of images or include movies and audio files.
• You can enter information into WordPress with a “visual editor” or as HTML, whatever you are most comfortable with.
• The site owner (unless the hosting provider has set restrictions) is completely free to set things up however they like and anyone with an internet connection and most any web browser can access a WordPress site (within the parameters of how content is being protected).

Believe it or not, WordPress is perhaps just a ubiquitous as Facebook (you are looking at a website built with WordPress now) and unlike any of the “free” or paid services, it can be made to do and show exactly what you want. All “free” social networking services have a price, typically an invasion of the user’s privacy. And other services such as MobileMe are great for sharing images and media files but are not designed for text materials and interaction such as commenting.

A quick digression for the sake of accuracy is needed. WordPress began its’ life as “open source” (essentially that means free) software to create a Weblog (Blog) and has evolved into a full featured system used by a huge number of people and companies to create full featured websites, blogs, online stores, and membership systems. The basic source code of the software remains free as do a great number of “themes” and “plugins” that add functionality to the core software. There are also many commercial themes and plugins. In short, WordPress is a “very happening” piece of software.

It is installed on a web server and requires the availability of PHP and the MySQL database which most website hosts provide. Many website hosting plans offer a WordPress installation as part of their hosting package and many dedicated WordPress hosts are available. There is even a free WordPress hosting service by the makers of WordPress itself.

But if you already have a basic knowledge of WordPress and are looking for a theme to use as a starting point, consider one of the themes developed by PageLines. While these themes are not specifically designed for the family archivist (I don’t know of any that are), they are all very well designed and support many useful features for the display of image galleries without additional customization and support a nice array of easily implemented page layout options. They have also introduced a rather unique theme system that lets the site owner/designer drag around the many layout elements to create exactly what is desired without having to know anything about coding such things.

The theme used as a starting point for Capture the Past is the PageLines iBlog theme. I highly recommend their themes as a great way to start out with a solid layout and build forward rather than struggling just to get started.

Extra... Extra!

There is nothing of particular note in my memories and nothing of particular note in my life that that warrants particular note in history. I am not famous, likely will not become famous and frankly would not appreciate most of the consequences being so would entail.

I am, like most, happy to only be noteworthy among family and friends rather than among complete strangers. But the Internet allows me to tell you my stories and express whatever views I hold, despite my lack of notoriety. No major broadcasting corporation or government agency needs to find me worthy of being given “airtime”. It is also possible for most anyone that can find their way here and read what I am posting to do the same! Isn’t that wonderful and quite amazing?

I will be telling some stories and conveying information on “Capture the Past” because I have found the process of becoming a family archivist to be rewarding on many levels. That is primarily what this digital undertaking is about. I hope to influence those who find their way here in a positive manner — to save, organize and pass along your own family history before it passes by you.

My stories are presented with the understanding that they are likely to be similar in many ways to your own stories and your own family history. Certainly not in the details but rather, on a core level. We all have stories and they are all important to us. They are also important to our families who, if we don’t take the time to tell them, will not have the opportunity to benefit from them.

Consider this and tell me (seriously, post a comment) if this doesn’t ring true to you in some way.

Generation Gap

One of my grandfathers died when I was eighteen. At that age, I was mostly interested in myself as all teenagers are and it was too soon for me to rethink and restore the relationship I had with him as a child. But he didn’t live long enough to allow that to occur. I have fond childhood memories of my grandfather but was never able to ask him directly about his life and what he had learned. I was never able to speak with him as an adult. Most of what I know about him, beyond childhood memories, came from my parents.

I am now in my mid 50′s and my parents are now both gone. My daughters know only of my grandfather through this chain of stories. And their grandparents died when they were teenagers, in a similar state of mind that I was at eighteen. They too have wonderful childhood memories of their grandparents but must now rely upon me to fill in the adult details before the chain is broken and something happens to me.

So why is this at all important? Who cares what we know or don’t know about long dead relatives we never even met?

Well … who do you want your children’s heroes to be? A cartoon character, an action figure, a rock star, a movie star, a person from history, a current world leader? Likely they, as we all, will have many temporal “heroes” during their lives but isn’t it wonderful when they can also have someone in their own family to serve as a “local hero”.

Of course I am exaggerating by the use of the word “hero” but only to make a point. If we do not know the better qualities of our own family members we are missing the continuity of life. Before we pass, we need to pass along.