On The Cost of Memories so Fleeting
The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time.– Abraham Lincoln
.
Who amung us does not remember the time they found a old brown photograph of their grandparents or the like, faded and time worn, yet a stark reminder of what once was; A time forgotten to past age? Even today, almost all of us can go dashing about the house in some old tool or shoe box and find a memory, lost in time, caption on the back.
Yet we are losing the ability to make these memories. Losing them to the march of time and technology. Today’s digital camera’s allow up to 500 pictures and as a popular commercial pointed out, few of these leave the camera. People caption their face book and flicker pictures but really, do these companies have the lasting power of GE or Walgreens? What happens when they close? What happens when you find a better service and want to move on? Can you take your pictures with you? How do you turn over the photo and see the data and time and who’s in the picture?
There are dozens of services to make print outs of pictures, but these are really for parents or grandparents unused to technology. It’s easier to send the pictures by email, and as technology moves on, so much easier to lose them. Think for a second, how far back do you have a digital picture album? How many pictures have you lost to a bad memory card or hard drive crash? Memories, times, events, as quick as they were gone, lost.
Recently, what i’ve started to do is collect a year in pictures. Carefully go over them, and them make a book online (amazon or a dozen others will do it.) A picture book, about 14.00 to 50 bucks, then oder a copy for myself and my family. In some cases i can caption the images, in others, i just write the caption in the book, after all, its mine. Thou, i don’t know how long i can keep it up. It’s like organizing books or CD’s. You know you should do it, yet, you can’t sit down and do it.
In the end i don’t have a solution for you, for this. Take $10 a month and just print some prints from your digital camera. If you can upload them to flicker or myspace, you can upload to walgreens and wolf camera and then, have them sent to your house. Surely, a memory, 20 years from now is worth that $10.
Surely so.
OceansOfThought @ May 22, 2008
There are a lot of women (and fewer, but some men) like myself that are meticulous historians for their families. I purchased my digital camera about 6 years ago just before my son was born, and have followed roughly the same pattern of printing the best photos every 6 months (+/-), putting them together in scrapbooks and archiving the source files on both a CD and a portable hard drive. This has worked well for preservation except when my hard drive crashed and I didn’t yet have the CD, luckily I had already printed the best shots, so I only lost a few months of 2nd tier pictures.
I have also worked intermittantly over the last 14 years in compiling my family genealogy/history/folklore, taking interviews from aging relatives, scouring public records, writting letters and asking for information forms to be filled out, and scanning old photos from dozens of family treasure boxes. Sometimes a tedious and usually a thankless job, I like to think that at some point my children, or theirs, will be interested in their family history (my guess is that a photo will first catch their eyes) and will at least peruse one of the volumes I’ve compiled through the years. Generations of background and story are fading each day as our grandparents die off in droves, and some of us take the preservation of personal histories very seriously indeed; I think it helps us to understand where we’ve been, where we are, and who we might be.