ccSCOOP - PERSPECTIVE - PRESERVING MEMORIES FOR THE HOLIDAYS

PRESERVING MEMORIES FOR THE HOLIDAYS

ccSCOOP Perspective

Carole Osterink
ccSCOOP Editor

My father was the official chronicler of our extended family. He was the one with the 8mm movie camera. Not a birthday or a Christmas morning went undocumented at our house. But for recording the extended family, the Fourth of July was the holiday of choice. In the earliest movies, the cousins are toddlers and young children, playing on the big lawn beside my grandparents’ house. In the latest ones, we’re early adolescents and teenagers, swimming and waterskiing at an uncle’s cottage on the lake.

A few times a year, my dad would decide, on a Friday or Saturday night, that the family would watch home movies instead of TV. He would get out the projector and put up the screen, Mom would make popcorn, and we would sit in the dark watching the images of ourselves and the people we knew and loved best flickering in silence on the screen.

As the years passed and my sister and I grew up, the 8mm projector came out less and less often. Finally, there came a time when no one was really sure if the old projector still worked or if the splices in the film would hold. (My father was meticulous about his cinematic efforts and loved to edit.) The movies that visually documented our family memories had themselves become memories.

For one of my mother’s significant birthdays, my sister had the best of our family movies converted to videotape. At the party, the tape played over and over on a TV set in the corner. There were always people watching. By that time, we had all moved up a generation or more—we’d certainly moved apart geographically—but watching those old movies of family gatherings that had happened decades before brought us back together.

Which brings me to the point of my reminiscences. The visually recorded memories of earlier generations can be lost with new generations of technology. Movie cameras and film were replaced by camcorders and videotape, and camcorders and videotape have since been replaced by digital video cameras and DVDs.

But just in time for the holidays, HAVE Inc. in Hudson is doing a really good thing to help preserve family memories. They will convert the 8mm film that documents your family’s Baby Boomer generation and the videotape that documents your family’s Generation-X into DVDs, so that everyone—now and in the future—can enjoy the visual record of your family history. They will do this for a fee that puts these priceless memories well within most gift-giving budgets—starting at just $30. AND they will donate 10 percent of the proceeds to the Hudson Area Library.

In this holiday season, what could be better? You can patronize a local business that’s been part of the community for thirty-one years. You can preserve your family history and give family members a unique and exceptionally meaningful gift. And you can help the library.

HAVE’s offer is good through December 31, 2008. To take advantage of it, call Mike Bradford at 828-2000. Be sure to mention the library—and you might also mention that you read about it on ccSCOOP.