Recording Memories...

For the past several years I've been asking what I need to put all the video tapes we have from when the girls were young onto dvd. For my birthday, my girls and their guys, gave me a tape,dvd player/recorder. Because Meagan was in New Orleans this weekend for a wedding, we are celebrating Father's day next Sunday. Lou and I decided the time was right to sit down and figure out how to actually work the machine.

We pulled out the tapes and tried to determine what kind of order to record our holidays, vacations, school plays and dance recitals. This is going to be a very time consuming project. The tapes are labeled but we are finding that we jump from a vacation in 1987 to a Christmas program one of the girls was in, in 1990. This means we probably should actually watch each tape before it's put onto the dvd. We've also found that on some of the tapes the tracking is off and the new machine will not record it. I think we may try the old vcr to see if the tapes play better on that...old tapes, old technology?

Below are my Dad and Holly jumping the waves in Ocean City, Maryland in 1988.
He did the same thing with me when I was 8. My parents were living just outside of OC and my girls would spend a week or so in the summer with my Mom and Dad. I am sorry that my sister's children never got to know their Grandfather the way mine did. I think I will probably put together a recording with bits of family happenings for my niece and nephew so they can actually get to know the loved ones who were no longer with us by the time they were born.

We spent hours yesterday recording tapes from the summers of 1987 and 1988. Those were just of the beach and the pool we belonged to when the girls were young. I kept saying to Lou, "I forgot about that!" We laughed that his hair was dark and that he actually had hair. We laughed that I hated that he would be taking a movie of me when I thought he should be filming the girls. We laughed remembering the wonderful times we had with the families. We have so much history yet to watch. Holly was in middle school and she had a project to interview the oldest person she knew. We took that big old video camera to my Grandmother's apartment (she was 91), set it on a tripod and let Holly ask the questions on her list. My Grandmother told us stories of her life as a child. She remembered being evacuated from her home during the Baltimore Fire of 1904 and being at a church, watching the flames go through the city. Her Mother had died of consumption when my Grandmother was 3 and I believe her sister was 5. My Great Grandfather had to cope with raising 2 little girls without their Mother. This is such a wonderful piece of family history and I am so grateful to the teacher who assigned the project. I knew the stories, but we actually have this recording with my dear Grandmother telling her memories, and would probably not have this without that assignment.

Our sweet Lucy watched with us...she got to see and hear one of the pups who came before her.
So funny, she barked at Alabaster barking on one of the tapes.

We have probably 40+ tapes to watch and record to dvd. I am sure that I will come across more times I don't remember even though I was the person behind the camera. But in doing this, I hope I will be giving the next generation a glimpse into what goofy, silly, wonderful people they come from!