Today I  had to share with you a way to save family memories and the importance of it. Being in the papercrafting business, we often think we need to be making those scrapbooks, doing. something with the boxes of photos we have.  Some diligent scrapbookers actually accomplish these goals, and others of us know we will do it “someday”, “any minute now”.  I’ve known for a long time that there are companies out there that will save your old VHS tapes and home movies on digital media. Again, I thought this would be a good thing to do “someday”, but of course that’s as far as it would go.

Then one day I was talking to a dear friend on the phone whose husband was hooking up a TV and wondered if the old tape player still worked. He asked her to hand him one of those VHS tapes.  She did and found home movies of her son’s graduation and party back at their house, which her parents and in-laws had attended, plus my family! She was enthralled with the chance to look back at all the kids who were young back then, her family members, some of whom had died, what their house at the time looked like, the food we had, the decor, everything about it!  We talked about how we “should” be getting these movies and things digitalized “sometime”.

As it happened, the next morning I thought to look up the Legacybox website since it was a company I had heard of. Although I had to leave for an appointment in a few minutes, I just spontaneously went ahead and ordered a box, without doing hours of research, that they would send me in which to mail back to them a certain number of home movies, photos, whatever I had. Another friend had also told me about doing this with her family’s memories, how easy it was, and how great for her daughters to sit down with their grandfather and watch the movies back and talk about his life.

Since then I have taken advantage of coupon deals and sent in a couple other boxes of old home movies, both film and VHS tapes. They still return your originals, so no need to worry you are giving those up. They send back a flash drive or DVD or I think put it in the cloud for you to download. Different companies may do it different ways.

Awhile back I found a box with these big and small boxes of old reel-to-reel recordings, like from an old-fashioned tape recorder! Some are labeled, some aren’t.  Way back when, relatives on my grandpa’s side of the family bought one of these big old tape recorders and for some reason got a “deal” for us to purchase one also.  Then we would make a recording and mail it to those relatives and they would make a recording and send it to us!  I don’t have that old tape recorder so I couldn’t play these tapes, and would be afraid of damaging them even if I could. So I sent them in to be digitalized, not sure how they would turn out. And thinking they wouldn’t be as exciting as the home movies.

I got the box back the other day with the flash drive I had chosen, and I have to say, WHAT A TREASURE!!  The first one was from 1968!  My grandpa starts it off pretending this is a radio station and then everyone in the room talks about something on the tape….my grandma’s birthday dinner, her friend visiting from Chicago, my Homecoming football game, our new dog, etc.  I heard my grandma’s laugh in the background!  When I thought about it, everyone on that tape has died, except my brother and me.  Old home movies usually don’t have sound, so to be able to hear everyone’s voices again was such a treasure! Another tape had me playing the piano for another family gathering at our house, my brother playing the accordion, my dad playing the piano a little bit and an actual sing-a-long of sorts!! If you would have asked me if my family ever had a sing-a-long I would have said, “Absolutely not!” Yet, there it was, such a happy evening at our house. Another tape must be a recording of an old record my grandma’s brother, an opera singer, had made. I suppose the record was playing on a record player and then someone recorded the sound with the tape recorder. I hear him singing and playing the piano. I haven’t even had time to listen to all of the tapes yet but I will. I didn’t expect the quality to be so good after all these years and wasn’t even sure at all what was on these recordings.

So my message is, if you have family memories like these tucked away in boxes, don’t just ignore them or leave them there because you don’t know what to do with them.  And yes, it costs money, but what good do the old movies, tapes, cassettes, VHS tapes do for you if you can’t access what’s on them. Better to spend some money and be able to enjoy them.  Someday the current media will probably have to be upgraded to whatever technology is available in the future.  But at least you are saving what you have now before it degrades in quality any more. The company can only do as good preserving these things as the quality of the material you provide.

This is a lot quicker than making a scrapbook!  You can even just send in old photos, slides, and more and get them digitalized. For me, it was more important to do the materials that I couldn’t access myself, like home movies, audio tapes, etc.

While this isn’t meant to be a commercial for Legacybox, I will say I was satisfied with the process and they send emails all along the way to update you on the progress.  It’s a little nerve-wracking to send off your treasured items in the mail, but there is tracking so hopefully that keeps everything from getting lost. And it’s probably a good idea to order or make your own extra copies of what you get back and give to another family member to keep in case of fire or floods at your house or even just forgetting where you put it, so there will be another copy available somewhere else!

If you have movies and things you want to save, do it now.  The family memories you can actually enjoy will be worth it!