Family History Vacations
Submitted by Dale E. Lee
2022.06.15
Summer is the time for vacations. But it can also be the time to record memories that will be meaningful in the future. Consider combining your vacation with visits to relatives, family reunions, and other family related events. You can kill two birds with one stone and at the price of only one stone to boot!
Time seems to slip by faster the older you get. As you age, you’ll find that loved ones graduate this life and if you are not careful, you’ll loose important information once they pass, especially voice and video recordings. Vacations can be an ideal time to record the family interacting with each other and gather together and reminisce about old events. Once they pass, you may loose the ability to record their voices… possibly forever.
But even if they do die, if you’re careful when you’re cleaning out their belongings after passing, you may find old treasures you were unaware of. It may be a challenge to digitize some of those recordings, but in many cases it will be well worth while. I personally found tapes with information on parts of the family I didn’t have a lot of contact with and discovered information about the family I didn’t know even growing up in it, especially things that happened after I left home.
Holidays and Vacations are favorite times for family to meet together and discuss past events, and some of those past events may be important enough to copy, transcribe, and or digitize for future generations. It is nice to read about events, but it’s much better to hear and see your relatives relating the events themselves.
If you haven’t had a chance to get access to old recordings, pictures, etc., ask around the family. It may be that someone either has a copy, can create one, or knows where one is. The longer you wait, the more possibility that it will be lost, destroyed, or trashed by someone that does not understand its value.
The following are a list of different types of media you may want to look for when searching for past information important to the family:
- Slides
- Photos
- Cassettes
- Hi8 videos
- Super8 videos
- Vinyl records
- Diskettes
- Flash drives
- External drives
- Paper documents
- Tin pictures
- Paintings
- Notebooks
- Velum bound books
- Etc.
Good luck! Collect as much as you can, then organize it, and copy it so others can enjoy it too, just remember to take into account copyright laws when doing so.
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