01 Jul Sharing Photos at Family Reunions
Summertime is a great time for family reunions. Family reunions are an excellent opportunity to catch up with relatives you don’t get to see often and to share family history, family traditions and family pictures.
Family history could be collected by recording family members telling stories of the past or by taking notes while a family member is relating stories, or shortly afterwards. I had the opportunity to use both the voice recorder and the note taking approaches this year.
One of my cousins from Argentina came to visit, and she brought with her lots of old family pictures that she collected from her house and from some other cousins. This particular cousin still lives in our grandmother’s house, which still contains many of her possessions, most importantly the old family photos. We sat around a table looking through the pictures with my mom, who is about the only person left who knows anything about the pictures and the people in them. I turned on the tape recorder and captured whatever conversation was going on. As we discussed the pictures, I numbered them on the back with pencil and wrote about them in a notebook. I then went home and scanned the pictures. I still have to transcribe the discussion, and I’m sure I will be able to create a nice book with text and pictures to share with that branch of the family.
The opportunity to take notes came this summer when I visited Israel, where my father’s side of the family resides. After a wonderful meal, my aunt started talking about her experiences in Argentina as a child, and in Israel as an adult; she talked about my great-grandmother as well as other members of the extended family. That evening, I jotted down her stories in my travel journal. I had scanned her pictures on a previous visit and scanned another aunt’s pictures this visit. My intention is to create a book for them with text and pictures.
Another way to capture family history is to do genealogical research on such websites as Ancestry.com or FamilyTree.com. A family tree could be created, and the pictures of the individuals added to the tree to create a decorative, and informative, wall hanging.
Family traditions could be captured in photo books, also. One fun example is to create a family cookbook. The book would contain favorite family recipes, and the accompanying pictures would be of family members cooking the dishes, photos of the completed dish or entire meal, and, of course, the family enjoying the food!
Remember, these ideas are not limited to printed photographs! These ideas could be applied to the digital photos you take on your phone, iPad, digital camera, or any other device. You would just need to download the pictures and take it from there!
The ways to share family history are limited only by your imagination! You could create books, slide shows, movies, games such as the Memory Game offered by PinHole.com, puzzles, calendars . . .
If you need help organizing your pictures or coming up with a clever and innovative way to share your family’s pictures, please do not hesitate to contact me at amira@PreciousMemsPhoto.com or visit my website www.PreciousMems.com.
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