My Legacy Project - Introduction

Hello and welcome to this introductory video for My Legacy Project. The video you are about to see was originally created for Save Your Photos month, a service of an organization call the Photos Managers where each September they present a series of instructional videos on family photos and history. I thought it would be a good way to start things off and begin to give you an idea of some of the things you can do and how to start preparing.

My Legacy project started a few years ago as a way of putting together pictures of my family with some of the stories I knew about or had been told about. I posted these to my website and it was a lot of fun.

But I realized at some point that I was not addressing a very important component of the process, which was how best to preserve and archive these pictures and stories so they can be passed on and exist for future generations.

We are now in the digital age and both our photos and videos are all digital, as well as many of the documents and other items we use to record our lives. Historians are grappling with ways to preserve these things, they even have a term to describe the risks of the digital age, they call it the “Digial black hole”. These are important challenges as media becomes obsolete and hard drives fail. How are we going to preserve our digital history?

So if historians are seeking answers to preserving our global history, how do we preserve our family history with the massive of amounts of Digial files we are accumulating, along with the inevitable deterioration of the aging prints, film, and paper records we have been attempting to keep safe.

So I am setting out to answer some of these questions for myself so that I can then help others preserve thier family histories, photos and documents.

And I thought it would be interesting to document and record my process a bit and present for others to see and I explore and seek the best answers and solutions.

In the follow months I will post new videos about my progress, to my website and in my monthly newsletter.

A brief summary of the process as I see it now will cover the following.

• Organize and de-dupe digital photo collection

• Organize and scan older prints, film, and slides

• Collect and organize artwork, documents, and records

• Create and curate a Legacy Collection

• Create projects from Legacy Collection

• Projects

  • Printed albums

  • Personal video documentaries of family members

  • Family trees and time lines

  • Upload to Archival platform

I always welcome your feedback and suggestions. My contact info as well as some other resources I mention in this video can be found at the end of it.