#37 - Family History in Snapshots

Do you ever have those days where you have a whole list of things to do and somewhere along the way you find yourself totally absorbed in a project that wasn't on the list wondering what happened to the original plan?  Today was one of those types of days for me.  I started off thinking that I would spend a good portion of my day off working on writing mystery clues (a DayZero goal) for the party that my siblings and I are planning for my Mom's 80th birthday party later this summer.  It was a great plan - a visit to the park with a friend and her boys in the morning (accomplished before it got too hot), another friend stopping by for drinks and conversation tonight (the mead is chilling in the frig), a few chores and the clues in between ... but then I remembered that I had promised to send some photos to my sister for something she's working on for the same party.  No problem!  How long could that take?

Well, some of it didn't take long at all - choosing photos from my own collection.  But then I thought of my DayZero goal to transfer some of my parent's old slides to digital files.  And, I had the two earliest reels of photos at my house just waiting (for, ahem, the past 3 years) for me to transfer them to files using a nifty device that I purchased 3 years ago when I brought the slides home.  I hadn't even opened the shipping box for it until this afternoon. Yikes!  I knew that those reels contained the photos from my parents' wedding and that Janet was looking for things like that.  So, I was only going to do a few ... just the wedding ones.  Yep, my love of old photos took over, and I scanned all 200 that I have at my house.  Which completed this goal ... even though there are probably another thousand or so still at the farm to scan.

I've tried to get these slides into digital form before - with a jury-rigged set-up that consisted of taking photos of the slides when they were projected onto a screen.  It wasn't the most successful endeavor - particularly with those photos that were dark - which is why I decided to try again.  I really want all of my siblings (and nieces and nephews that are interested) to have access to all of our family photos.  I don't think of myself as a visual learner sort of a person, but those snapshots bring back a cascade of great memories.  I don't want anyone in the family cut off from them.

To show you the difference in my first attempt and today's project, here's an example of first try/second try shot.  (A photo of me doing needlework on a family camping trip at age 6).  And, I hope this inspires some of you to pull out some family albums of your own to reminisce ...

projected on a screen

using the proper scanning device