All Blog Posts Tagged 'Memories' (115)

The Salt Of The Earth – about Sebastião Salgado

Last week I watched the documentary “The Salt of the Earth” about documentary photographer Sebastião Salgado. This is one of those films that I can’t stop thinking about, which is a good thing.

For those that aren’t familiar with Salgado’s work, he is a Brazilian photojournalist and social photographer that has traveled the world photographing indigenous cultures and the social effects of major geo-political actions on these…

For the past few weeks I have been involved in a back and forth phone tag with a potential client.

Each time he’s called me, I returned the call, and each time I called, he was  busy and told me he would get back to me. A couple weeks ago he asked me to send him some more information about my work so I sent him a flyer, and links to several video clips and testimonials. But we never actually had “the conversation” about…

“I mean, they say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.”  — Banksy

While this quote was directly attributed to the graffiti artist Banksy, the sentiment is not his alone and appears all over the place, attributed to…

My grandmother used to make these amazing cookies for special occasions. They are called Franz Joseph Cookies and supposedly took their name from the famous Emperor of Austria. I’m not really sure the back story on how my grandma got this recipe but it was a family favorite and one that had great pomp and circumstance around the making of the cookies. She resisted giving the recipe to anyone for many years and finally when she was well into her late 80s, she gave me the recipe. When I make…

I just took a look at my blog this morning and realized it’s been almost 4 months since I wrote anything. My commitment has always been to try for twice a month and I have alerts set on my calendar to remind me of that commitment.

I think that after finishing my documentary and screening it at the end of May, I was just pretty wiped…

Over the weekend I had the pleasure of watching La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty), an epic Italian film in the style of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, but with more cinematic greatness achieved by the advances in technology since the 1960s as well as a more existential examination of life. It was truly captivating and I am planning on a second viewing next week as the MFAH is bringing it back for an…

I have been reading about the concept of “Happiness Jars.” In Elizabeth Gilbert’s blockbuster memoir “Eat, Pray, Love” she started a project where she would write down things that have made her happy each day on little slips of paper and put them in this large glass jar. By doing so every day, eventually her jar would overflow with happiness.

I am proposing something similar but let’s call it a Memory Jar or more aptly, the Memoir Jar. Starting tomorrow, January 1st 2014, make a…

Sometimes you see something visual and it just resonates with you on such a deep level that it starts the beginnings of an interest, an obsession, or even a love affair.

I was in the Catherine Couturier Gallery a couple months ago and came across a few pieces by artist Photographer Rachel Phillips, who considers herself a photographer yet uses her photography in such a unique…

There’s an old joke:

A Texan is talking with an Israeli and comparing the size of Texas to the size of Israel. He says, “when I get in my car, I can drive for hours and not get to the end of my ranch.” The Israeli says, “I had a car like that once too.”

Most of the people I know drive and take their driving for granted. Unless you live in a packed urban area where the cost of keeping a car outweighs the access it will provide, most people have a car, or two, or sometimes three. I…

As a preservationist, I am always excited when a big name comes on the bandwagon providing information to consumers about preserving precious family archives. It’s a platform I’ve been preaching and promoting for 10 years now and I still consider it as vitally important now as it was when I first became aware of this.

One this stuff is gone, it’s gone!

The New York Times recently added Bertram Lyons, an archivist at the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress in…

Have you ever wondered if there are secrets in your family’s past you don’t know about? Even if you have never wondered, what would your reaction be if you found out your family was not who you thought them to be?

The Flat (2011 Documentary by Arnon Goldfinger) examines this premise as the Director, Arnon Goldfinger, and his family begin to clean out the flat…

This week an article about the process of immortalizing one’s memories made it to a special Retirement section in the New York Times. My company, Legacy Multimedia, was prominently featured along with other projects and organizations that focus on the preservation of physical mementos and recording of memoirs.

For me, this is incredible validation of the work I do. The excitement I feel working with each new client, discovering who they…

I have talked a lot on my blog and on Facebook about how the digital world has changed our relationship and concept of memoir. With each national disaster, we turn to Facebook, Twitter and other online websites to find out what happened, then understand the impact and finally to share our upsets and grief. We mourn publicly in a way we couldn’t have imagined only 10 years ago.

Grief in a Digital Age

Jessica’s…

2013 marks the 10 year anniversary of Legacy Multimedia. It will be later this fall and I will commemorate the decade in a fitting manner…. later.

Right now, with the new year, and this huge blank slate of time before me, I want to focus on my new mantra regarding my own personal history, “get ‘er done!” (Since I live in Texas, I can talk to myself in cowboy language.)

Right about the time that I was starting Legacy Multimedia, I also started the long and complex process of…

This week marks the beginning of the holiday gift-giving season. Perhaps you are wondering what you might give to a fellow family history researcher or genealogist, or maybe your family and friends are asking you for hints.

Simple, practical gifts include a disposable camera to take to cemeteries, a package of photo paper, mini-cassette recorder for archive research or interviewing relatives, vinyl-coated paper clips, acid-free file folders and archival-safe, acid free and lignin-free…

I was watching some news coverage of Hurricane Sandy a few days ago and there was a woman standing on the site of what was once her home, holding a battered and soggy wedding photo of her parents. She was sobbing, saying this was the only photo she could find of her parents. It was painful to watch. For years, I have been writing about the need to protect heirloom property such as photos and scrapbooks. I can’t recall where I read this but insurance companies report that the number one loss…

Last week I was at an annual conference for the Association of Personal Historians in St. Louis, Missouri. This is my fourth conference to attend, and one of the highlights for me is catching up with people from all over the world that I communicate with regularly but don’t get to see in person all too often, as well as meeting new historians and learning about the work that they are up to.

This year I had the pleasure of having dinner with a Danish woman. She told me about a long…

 1000memories’ Online Photo Digitizing Technology Brings New Sharing

Capabilities to Ancestry.com Users (PROVO, Utah) – Oct. 3, 2012 – Ancestry.com Inc. (Nasdaq: ACOM), the world’s largest online family history resource, announced today it has acquired 1000memories Inc., the San Francisco-based startup that has been focused on helping people digitize and share the estimated 1.7 trillion paper photos stored in their albums, attics, and shoeboxes.

Founded…

First of all, what is oral history? Put simply it is a collection of testimonies by living persons to record their unique life stories. They are not based on gossip, hearsay or rumors. Instead, oral histories are chronicles of direct observations as told by the people who witnessed the events or lived through the experiences being described. They are taken straight from the horse’s mouth so to speak.

This can be a great way of capturing the life and times of your family, close…

A Hope Chest was originally used as a dowry. It was property that a woman owned and brought into her marriage. Some women could not find a suitable husband, for various factors; therefore, the dowry was used as a way of enticing a man into marriage.

The idea of a Hope Chest symbolizes so many hopes and dreams. It’s about seeing the future unfold before your very eyes and it’s about preserving a lifetime of memories and building a family legacy, a heritage. It’s a place where a young…