A big job for special occasions these days involves gathering up lots of photos from the past. While preparing for their anniversary party, I think I had eight of Mom and Dad’s photo albums and numerous framed pictures and letters scattered around the kitchen. It was hard not to just scan them all, but I was trying to focus on the important, clear pictures that would help tell “their story.” Some of the photo albums were in pretty good shape, others were a little more worn; most of the pictures still looked good, if not a little yellowed, but I wonder how much longer they will last?
One of the things I found – a newspaper -- was getting dangerously close to tatters. The following family story, which the article describes, is why Mom has kept this newspaper for so long. On March 31, 1966, eight days before Chuck was born, Dad was involved in a terrible car accident that almost killed him. He was thrown through the windshield of the truck he was driving and landed in a field. He crawled to a nearby farmhouse for help. He was in such bad shape that the coroner was asked to prepare his death certificate. The story was picked up by a local newspaper and printed on the front page. I found that newspaper at Mom and Dad’s, which Mom has kept for the past 47 years. It was very yellowed and some of the paper was tearing at the crease at the end of the article, but it’s still very readable and I was thankful to get it scanned.
As a bonus, scanning in these pictures often revealed details about them that I’d never noticed – even in pictures I was very familiar with. When pictures are scanned, it allows you to zoom in on them, which sometimes reveals details that were otherwise too small to see.
For example, when I was working on the invitations, I ended up enlisting the help of a friend who does desktop publishing. When I gave it to him, it had this picture of Mom and Dad on the cover:
My friend suggested getting a higher resolution scan of it (which I did at FedEx Kinko’s for $0.89) so we could crop out the lower half of the picture, allowing us to enlarge it so we could see their faces more clearly.
When we first saw it on his computer monitor, I think I gasped out lout. Seeing the picture so up close changed my impression of it completely. Mom looks confident (even if she was scared to death!), almost regal. Dad looks proud and comfortable with her on his arm.
The process of gathering and scanning all these things to preserve them takes a lot of time, but it is so important. I realized during this process that we are in a unique position at this point in history. If we’re lucky, most of us have quite a bit of paper documents (letters, written genealogies, journals, etc.) and print photos that chronicle our family histories. We also have the technology to preserve these important things before they fade or are destroyed. I truly believe the longer it’s put off, and the more distant we are to the people in these pictures and documents, the less likely it is that they will ever be digitally preserved.
I was thankful to get many things scanned, but there is still so much more to do. A lot of our Worley photos are print; I don’t think we got our first digital camera until 2006. That means I have a lot of work to do before the graduations start rolling by in a couple of years!
