I saw my first family tree when I was about seven years old. It was a very rare tree; just enough blank sheets to trace my family from me, my siblings, and my first cousins to grandma and grandpa. I remember I wasn’t too impressed at the time. Everyone in the tree was still alive, and even a seven-year-old can connect those dots without a cheat sheet.
I still don’t have anything like a genealogy flowchart that goes over and over again (although I’m at an age where it seems to matter a lot more). But my wife has rolls of names, dates and places and, more importantly, connections.
The scrolls are on very old parchment paper, yellowed enough and with jagged enough edges to give you an almost mystical feeling of holding the story in your hands. The rolls are difficult to handle; they should be spread out on a kitchen table and placed on the edges with vases of flowers or books or whatever is at hand. So you can see the time expansion on the expanding pages. And if we follow my wife’s lineage back a few pages, we come to the 13th century and (wow!) a great warrior king, Robert the Bruce, who to a Scots-Irish girl is something akin to royalty.
connections. That’s what it’s all about, this tenacious, sometimes frantic search for the missing link: the empty space on the last page that erects a stone barrier between us and he-who-came-before-the-last-us-can-I-find. .
If the parchments and the folders transmit us the sensation of the passage of time, much more so the images. From sketches to paintings to photographs, we get a glimpse of the times they lived in. We might even see something in the eyes, nose, or jaw that legitimizes our connection to the distant.
So what about the stories that accompany the names and images? If we’re lucky, our ancestors achieved enough fame to warrant historical documentation. Or maybe (but not often enough) someone took the time to annotate all those photos, at least with a name and date, if not a place and relationship. Hmmm. I think it’s Aunt Mabe in Yellowstone in the late 1940s, judging by the black Packard and the steaming geysers in the background. Then there are all those 8mm film reels that need to be converted to the latest and videos that can only be played on the original video camera (if it’s still working after all these years). So that leaves us with oral history, passed down from generation to generation, and much is lost or made into fiction in the telling of the stories.
Am I telling you something you don’t already know? Probably not. But I have something important to tell you; a stake to put in the ground.
We find ourselves in a world of enabling technologies that would put even our recent ancestors in a state of confusion. “It’s a Youtube world” – how often do we hear that? And it’s a world where we can begin to capture and preserve our loved ones. We can go from being frozen in time to moving, breathing, laughing in time. The funny, the scary, the happy, the sad, the wise, and the wonderful can all be encapsulated in pixels made up of ones and zeros. And the precious moments can live.
If they appear and talk and smile like real, are they still memories? Aside from the obvious lack of hugs and kisses, is meeting the digital great-great-grandmother any less impressive? What if she blows kisses?
So how do we accomplish this, put people “in the can”? It is a cinematographic term. Sorry if it sounds a bit, well, creepy? What matters is that there is still time for most of us to record our living legacies in colors that move, speak and live, and we have the affordable means to do so.
The problem does not lie in access to the equipment, nor in the cost of acquisition. The obstacle is, as always in our light-speed existence, the imagined difficulty of understanding the techniques and tools.
How difficult could it be? Not much really. And if you’re not up to the learning curve or the effort, hook any eight-year-old by simply taking their little fingers off the game controller while he or she is recharging. (Yes, it can be as dangerous as children in cyber battles).
Whether it’s you or a smaller version of you, the game is the same. You need a very affordable HD camcorder that records to an SD card the size of a postage stamp. You need a Mac or PC with an SD card reader (you can buy a cheap external reader if your computer doesn’t have one. And you need very simple software – probably whatever comes with the free camera is fine. Or you can move on to production from “Hollywood” for less than $100.
I’ll share more in future articles about shot composition, lighting, and sound, but you don’t need to follow me to get the job done. Can you line up your camera so Grandpa’s head isn’t cut off above the ears? Good. Can you find the little red record button, with or without the +2.50 readers? Almost there. Can you take the little card out of the camera and stick it into your computer’s card reader? Excellent. Now we can open the video file (just like opening a word processor) and start slicing and dicing. We then make a little movie, upload it to the “cloud” as we now know the great storage warehouse in the ether, and voila! Everyone in the family can see history alive, not just now, but for generations to come.
Think about it. If we start capturing our elders now, and our children capturing us, and their children capturing them, we can begin to record history: one family at a time, one story at a time, one culture at a time. And the lessons of life – morals, ethics and wise counsel – live forever.