Family Reunion - Slides and Sound Clips

Many families have lots of different mediums for pictures and sound clips. Some don't have anything. Mine, has everything. :-)

My mother has these red see through cellophane looking things that were "Dictaphone" tapes. This was what they used before "reel to reel" tapes which was before Cassette tapes, which was after records but before CD's which came before mp3's. 

My mother is on each one of these different sound mediums. It is interesting that she was on records as most people haven't been but copying these all over has been a challenge. We had to have my brother do electronic surgery on the Dictaphone machine because it was around long before output jacks were invented. He had to attach a microphone to the output speaker in order for us to capture my mothers voice off the red Dictaphone reels.

The reel to reel player my mother has is large and doesn't slow to the speed of the smaller "reel-to-reel" speeds needed so we had to borrow a player to listen and copy over some of those reels. We ran out of time and so even though we copied over the record, Dictaphone and some of the reel-to-reels and cassettes, we still have hundreds to go.

This past week alone, I have listened to about fifty cassettes. I throw out those that I can't hear what is being said and those that were of meetings or conferences but kept those that had historical purpose such as my grandparents telling stories of their childhood or our family singing some of the songs my grandmother wrote etc.

The pictures show all of the different devices we had to use to copy over the different media but even then, it isn't all of them as some were too large to put on the table. 

This picture with the pink lid bins is all of the movies we transferred over in the bins where they are stored and all the other bins are cassettes and other sound items such as all the different sizes of reel-to-reels that all need transferring over or to be listened to at some point.

Most computers have some kind of sound capture software and all you need to do is to put an input jack into the headphone jack of your computer and press play on the device you want to record over. The computer will capture it and make it into an mp3 or similar file which can then be played on your computer or mp3 player. It is really neat to hear yourself talking as a child. The other day I was amazed listening to a cassette that had my brothers and sisters and I on it and some of them sounded just like our children. I was confused for a few seconds thinking that we had somehow taped over what was originally on the tape with our own children. I laughed out loud when I realized it was my siblings that sounded like my kids and my nephews.

It was so funny that we were all recording ourselves doing commercials. I did one for "Arrid Extra Dry." My brothers did one for "Beer" (which was funny as no one at our home drank alcohol) and my older sister did one for shampoo. It was fun to hear my older brother talk about invention ideas he had in detail. He is the one that did the "surgery" on the Dictaphone machine and is always inventing something or fixing something. It was funny to see his personality developed by that age. 

Slides - There is no beating the crispness and longevity of slides. I am 45 this year and look at the crisp and clean color and lines of this slide we found of me as a baby. NO pictures we have from that long ago have lasted that well. They are bent, scratched, torn and faded by the years. There weren't many slides of me but the two I am including in this post show how well the color and time were detailed in the slides as if the picture was taken with a digital HD camera yesterday.


How we did the slides.... My parent's both traveled the world and they had thousands of slides. We did an initial quick scan holding them up to the light by the window. If there wasn't anyone in the picture, we put it right back into the box. I don't care about pictures of Europe in the fifties. Someone may want that for historical purposes but with all the stuff I have to worry about, I only want slides with people in them. 

The next scan we did was if they had people in them, we stuck them into one of the lighted trays as shown here, or we used a larger slide viewer, an actual slide projector or one of the little viewers shown here as well.

If we could tell that my parents, or another family member was in the slide, we took the time to scan it. If it wasn't someone that could be family, perhaps tourists or a slide of a program, we put it back into the box. 

Those that we scanned.... We used an HP flat bed scanner that has slide software. You can actually push a button on the top of the scanner that has slides or negatives and it will capture them. If they were spaced far enough apart, it will actually sort the slides into individual pictures. This was WONDERFUL! It will also allow you to edit it right then with making it lighter or darker, crop etc. It was very handy as as we took the slides off the scanner, we wrote on the slide what and who was on the slide so we would NEVER have to scan it again as we would know what was on it and hopefully, have the scans saved so that everyone could get a digital copy of them. I then took the time to place them into plastic slide sheet protectors by date and every slide that has someone in it, we kept. If they were of other families such as cousins, we gave them the original slides as we had no need for it. 


Here is a picture of all the different media items used to view or scan the slides. In the box of stuff I mentioned from my grandfathers house with all the old 8mm movies in it, there were about three boxes of slides that were wonderful to view. Many of my older cousins were in them with my grandparents and no one knew they existed. If we hadn't taken the time to ask around and search the stuff and actually find a scanner that transferred the slides over, my cousins wouldn't have those wonderful pictures of them as babies. One cousin had never seen her father and that is the only picture she has ever seen of him. 
 
Was it worth the nights and day of lengthy scanning, viewing, sorting etc???? I guess I'll have to ask my cousin... But, for me, getting that picture of me as a baby was worth going through my parent's slides. I had never seen a picture of me in color as a baby. I have a few black and white ones and a few of my surgeries (click here for that post) but I was thrilled to see that picture. There is one color picture of me in my cast and that also was a slide we found when doing the sorting and scanning. This picture is me when we lived in Alaska taking a train ride. I don't look so happy but look at how clear the picture and colors are. You can see every wisp of hair in the wind.

Funny that my sister took a picture of me having fallen asleep at my computer when I was staying with her and working on all this stuff. Her picture is much worse than the 40 year old slide from years before. 

Sometimes, I think slides were a blessing over pictures being developed as they look so much better. Anyway, here is the picture of me having "sit itus" (click here for a post about that.) after working so hard on family history... I so often wonder, "Will I ever be done?" Here's to hoping!