SNGF -- How Are You Saving Family Photographs and Home Movies?

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:

It's Saturday Night again -

time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Here is our assignment from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings: 

1)  Almost all genealogists have family photographs and/or home movies of their ancestors, relatives, and friends handed down over the generations. 

2)  What steps have you taken to obtain, save and pass on those photographs or home movies to your family members?

Here’s mine:
I have received photos or copies of photos from many of my ancestral lines and my husband’s lines. For my paternal line of Hork, Sullivan, Gleeson, & Tierney, I have received photos from my father’s sisters and from my father’s cousins. I wrote previously about the Gleeson family photo album here. One of my father’s cousins, Marjorie, sent me photos of the Hork family so I have photos of my grandfather, whom I never met, as a young boy and in his Naval uniform.

There are not many photos of my maternal side, though my grandmother had a few. One of my oldest is of her grandparents. When I visited my mother’s Johnston cousin, she let me take photos of some of the Johnston side that she had. My grandmother had a lot of photos of her, my grandfather, and my mother, but they are all snapshots, with only one or two from a studio.

On my husband’s maternal side, his aunt had lots of copies of Nilsen and Lundquist families and I was allowed to take digital photos of them. I have no originals. The originals are now filed in binders in sheet protectors, waiting to be donated to the California State Archives once his aunt passes away.

My husband’s paternal side has few photos of ancestors, though there are photos of his great-grandfather, Amos Gorrell, and his family, and there are also photos of Fred Davey and his family. These have also been scanned and put into binders for his mother. They have been passed on to us.

What am I doing with the photos I have? I have scanned many of them, especially ones used for genealogy writing. I purchased archival boxes and during the pandemic, I started organizing and scanning any that I hadn’t already done. However, the project was put on hold with my youngest daughter came to visit. All of the work was organized on her bed and I had to put it away. It has remained that way since. It seems I have other more pending projects to work on. After I turn in my renewal for recertification, I will get back to that project. One really needs space to lay it out. Organizing tends to make a mess before it is all neat up.

As for my own photos that I have taken, I have both slides and prints. Slides were taken before we had children and prints afterward. Now I have thousands of digital photos I have taken on trips. I don’t care what happens to the digital photos I have taken. The best ones are organized into Shutterfly books, which the daughters can keep or not. Before digital, I made Creative Memories scrapbooks and have about ten or so. These I’m sure would be kept by the girls. (I have digitized one daughter’s books, but not the other one yet. Another project to do at the FamilySearch center, which has scanners large enough to scan the whole page.) I made books for each girl and some from our own trips.

Copyright © 2023 by Lisa S. Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.