by Ronda Barrett, Honor Your Story
More and more of my clients are Boomers helping their aging parents downsize. The whole family is overwhelmed with the decisions about what to get rid of and keep. The process is emotional, stressful, and exhausting. Clients not wanting their family history related materials carted off to storage or shoved into the attic have reached out and asked for my help.
I have had the privilege to witness an interesting phenomenon while helping my clients organize their family mementos and photos. The act of acknowledging the past—the life lived in the home they are now leaving—and allowing for possible tears seems to help soften the distressing prospect of moving to a new place. Expressing appreciation for those memories seems to be an important step in the transition. The time devoted to the effort provides a way of saying goodbye. It also engages the generations in hearing the history, helping to reinforce the feeling of roots that a family home often represents. After all, it is the memories, the stories, and the familiar pictures on the wall that make a house a home. By capturing the stories, the entire family is able to take that sense of home with them and access it at any time.
Sorting Stuff
We begin the process by identifying the materials to be addressed. The more obvious items include:
Materials to be archived
- Photos (loose in albums, hanging on the walls)
- Negatives
- Slides
- Home movies (8mm, VHS)
- Important documents (letters, diaries, diplomas, birth certificates)
- Genealogical information (family bibles, family trees, “Descendants of…” books)
Less obvious items include:
- Electronically stored items, either on computers, hard drives or cloud storage (emails, photos, videos, documents)
- Paintings
- Textiles
- Collections (dishware, matchbooks, dolls, tools)
- Clothing (wedding dresses, vintage outfits)
- Furniture
- Other family heirlooms
In the sorting process, we prioritize photos and documents for scanning while photographing other types of physical items such as textiles, furniture or collections. Unboxing mementos often reveals problems with condition due either to aging or improper storage. Objects long forgotten may suddenly become prized items, of interest to many family members—who may now become concerned that future generations may not recognize a particular image as their great-great-grandmother. All of these issues can be addressed by preserving, digitally archiving, and logging information about materials, while capturing the family stories they represent through interviews.
Collecting Stories
After sorting materials, often into themes (such as ancestors, childhood, education, career, parenthood and travel), we record discussions of each area of interest. While we ask for specific details about items, the conversation soon moves to stories of that time in a person’s life. Photos and other visual materials are perfect jumping off points for stirring reminiscence.
Collecting family photo details
We often alternate between visits focused on reviewing photos and documents, to straight interview sessions spent fully focused on a topic or a part of their life. I come with questions, informed by the materials we have been handling, which have stoked my curiosity and their store of memories.
Creating the Archive
We digitize all the materials, creating a log of who, what, when and where. Having a proper digital archive allows owners to dispose of items in bad condition, donate when appropriate, place items with happy recipients, or discard things of lesser interest.
We scan photos so they can be shared and preserved, but it’s important to realize that we don’t know if Gmail will still exist 20 years from now or if JPG will be the main photo format or if computers will still have USB ports—whereas we know we can still look at printed photos 100 years or more after they are developed. So do not toss all physical materials! One thing creating a digital archives does do, however, is get owners to focus on their family history materials, assign priorities, pare them down to the most significant items, and then preserve them with archival quality supplies. Transcribe those interviews also, and create edited, printed copies of those as well.
Do not think of your digital archive so much as a treasure to keep in a vault—but more as a garden to be tended. And the best insurance for guaranteeing that the collection survives is to have multiple copies in multiple places in multiple formats. Hard drives fail. Types of storage fall out of favor (laptops no longer come with DVD drives). Thumb drives get lost. Cloud services get discontinued. Spreading the risk across multiple platforms and locations and checking in on them is the way to go.
Transforming the Collection
The archiving effort creates a sort of “digital shoebox” that loved ones far and wide can browse and enjoy. They are free to view a slideshow with their immediate family, create photo books, or upload favorite photos to family chat groups for discussion. There are countless ways the family can interact with the materials.
Most clients have me create a video from the interview footage and digitized materials. This allows them to see the glint in the matriarch’s eyes as she shares memories of visiting her grandparents as a child, or the pride with which a father says what traits he enjoys in his grandchildren. With all of the materials organized, clients often ask me to create a coffee table book or website for family members to enjoy the highlights of the effort. Books are a popular way to share the stories behind heirlooms, providing the point of connection to the family regardless of where the physical items end up.
Embracing Downsizing
For most people, downsizing means leaving the home where the majority of their lives was lived raising their children, building their career, enjoying their community, welcoming their grandchildren – life memories, big and small, have been lived there. Places and things draw our attachment because of the loved ones and moments they stir us to remember. They are a bridge to our stories. This is the perfect time to stop, reflect, express gratitude for that life and capture those stories.
To learn more about archiving your photos and capturing your family stories, contact Ronda Barrett at Honor Your Story.