Family History Can Take on Scary Forms SLIDES

Last summer I took on an impossible task. I gathered 8mm, super 8mm, 16 mm, VHS, pictures, slides, newspapers, reel-to-reel, cassettes, dictagraphs, photo copies, etc.

I spent several months sorting many boxes that had been previously sorted by my siblings and I. My mother has a paper illness. She can't throw any paper away. This can be good and bad. Nice that she had things of value, but bad that we spent months sorting papers. We sorted through so many boxes and I hate to think of the things that were lost in her house fire and floods.

The result of the sorting was about 25 boxes. I called my parents, uncles, aunts cousins, sibling and as a result, we ended up with black and white movies from 1938 on. Color movies from the late 1950's on. I found video of my parents wedding that no one knew we had. We found many slides no one remembers seeing. We have color film of a woman who walked across the plains as a pioneer child.

Many things went on during those months so I thought I would start by sharing how we broke it down. I will start with SLIDES. We bought several different types of viewers and ended up not using many because they took much time pulling slides out to view etc. My favorite was Eumig Diaport daylight slid projector/viewer/sorter.

I liked this viewer because it had a tray. I just tipped the tray I had them stored in into the one that came with the machine. Or, I presorted them looking into the light and then put them into the tray if I had any question on the slide.

I went through and took out any slides with people in them, then previewed them and gave the one's with people we knew in them to another sibling to scan. The result were some wonderful pictures that have never been seen. Slides of family reunions and more.

I then wrote the estimated date on the slide along with who was in it and where it was taken and organized them by date.

I stored the slides in some plastic slide holders but found that they were expensive so I just used baseball card holder plastic pages. (Make sure they are acid free.) Once the slides were organized by date (and event or family group) my brother and sister scanned them using a flat bed scanner. There are several types of scanners that will do this. Some will do only one slide at a time, we found that we liked the one's that did multiple slides at a time and then allowed you to edit each and save them individually.

They scans were saved on the computer by family in folders and then we made a disc of all the slides and pictures we scanned and gave them to the family at our reunion.

We also met extended family at the cemetery this Memorial Day and offered them what treasures we had collected.

I stored all the family slides in a binder with a label and the binders are stored in bins. If I needed one, I could get to the exact slide within minutes. Slides were just one of the things we did. I was impressed with the fact that the slides were better than the pictures many times and the color more crisp. Once they are scanned, it is easy to take them in on an SD card to get pictures made or you can do it online and they will mail the pictures to you.

My favorite reason for having done this is that everyone in the family has access to the pictures rather than just one person. If the house did burn, they are online and it doesn't matter. If one person has everything stored and they lose the house, the history is gone forever. My family had two house fires within a year. We also had several floods. With these being done now, I don't have to worry about things being lost.

The top pictures is my grandmother diving. There is one of a family reunion. One of my dad riding a camel and one of the home where my father grew up.

Happy Sliding......