Wander project the why of family history!

I haven’t shared the full family history project concept in a while, so today you get the whole story. I published an explanation of what I did a couple of days ago. First off, all of us have archives of pictures. If you look at the boxes, albums, and files, you probably have many more pictures than you realize. Personally, I converted to digital pictures around 1999. My wife converted around 2006. It took me a few years to convince her that she should give up her point and shoot but limited to 36 picture camera. She now uses the digital camera exclusively, but it took me seven years from the time I started to when she finally started using a digital camera only. It took me less time to convince my father, but by the time I convinced my dad to switch to digital, he already had more than 50 years of pictures.

(Please note, I was unable to post the images to Virily directly, the link above takes you to a facebook link with some family history pictures!)

Part of what mattered to me was the old pictures. When I was little, my sister and I would, after rushing for my Grandfather’s hats (the captain’s hat was the treasured cap) and fishing, we would sit in the living room of my grandparent’s house and look at the old family pictures. (most of those sadly now lost). When my grandfather passed away, he left me his 1948 Kodak Projector and all the film he had taken from 1948 to around 1974. I had those films converted into digital video files a couple of years ago. When my father died, he left me all the slides he had taken. My father loved photography and took slides starting in roughly 1958 until he converted to digital around 2004. He also left 4000 or so digital images, but those were a simple copy and paste. The slides would require scanning. 30,000 slides tucked into a box that my father and his father (my grandfathers) had taken over the course of more than 50 years. So many of the slides had never been seen by anyone other than my grandfather and my father.

My mother and my sisters also let me have to scan, all the print pictures my parents had collected over the years. That gives us images all the way back to the 1950’s. we lost the pictures that my sister and I used to thumb through, they were all scanned but the computer that had them, died. The memories that these pictures have for me is incredible. Based on that I began sharing the pictures with other people. First on a site called Niume and nowhere on Virily. Each picture regardless of how similar it is to another one, is important. Each was taken with the intent of being shared. The family history project is the sharing. The stories are unique. I remember them, share them and cherish not only the pictures but the memories that go with them. Someday, my children will be able to look back and see all the moments that were captured. That is goal of the Family History project. It is not art in the sense that all the images are grand and wonderful it is just recollections of images that once were.