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All Blog Posts Tagged 'Preserving' (79)

When Is Your Memory Truly Forgotten?

“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…

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Added by Stefani Twyford on January 14, 2015 at 10:03pm — No Comments

Reminisces On My Recent Trip to Turkey

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…

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Added by Stefani Twyford on October 29, 2014 at 11:21am — No Comments

Photographer Rachel Phillips; Field Notes

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…

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Added by Stefani Twyford on September 9, 2013 at 10:56am — No Comments

Our Culture of Drive

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…

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Added by Stefani Twyford on July 16, 2013 at 5:30pm — No Comments

Tips on Preserving Family Audio

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…

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Added by Stefani Twyford on May 31, 2013 at 10:00am — No Comments

The Flat – 2011 Israeli Documentary

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…

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Added by Stefani Twyford on March 29, 2013 at 8:50pm — No Comments

Legacy Multimedia Featured In The New York Times Article on Video Biography

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…

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Added by Stefani Twyford on March 20, 2013 at 1:05pm — No Comments

Digital Mourning – Grief In The Online Age

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…

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Added by Stefani Twyford on March 6, 2013 at 7:37pm — No Comments

Photo Preservation Reminder In The Wake of Hurricane Sandy

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…

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Added by Stefani Twyford on November 16, 2012 at 11:41am — No Comments

Danish Cultural Perceptions Toward Oral History

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…

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Added by Stefani Twyford on October 31, 2012 at 12:57pm — No Comments

Creating an Oral History to Capture and Preserve Unique Life Stories

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…

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Added by Stefani Twyford on September 29, 2012 at 10:37am — No Comments

Hope Chest

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…

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Added by Stefani Twyford on September 3, 2012 at 1:36pm — 2 Comments

Gone But Not Forgotten – A Video Memoir

A couple of months ago, a good friend of mine’s brother passed away unexpectedly. He was in his late 30s and while he did have some medical issues, there was nothing that would have predicted a young and untimely death. Naturally his family was devastated.

A memorial was held and as is typically done, a photo slideshow was hastily put together and shown, along with poems, readings and other memorial elements our culture historically does when memorializing someone.

Not long…

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Added by Stefani Twyford on July 18, 2012 at 10:04pm — No Comments

The Soundtrack Of My Life Story

A couple of weeks ago my husband and I went to visit our friends in New Braunfels, a town near San Antonio, Texas. The next town over, Gruene, (pronounced, for some unexplainable reason, as Green) is a well-known tourist spot and home to Gruene Hall, built in 1878 and the oldest continually running dance hall in Texas. Many famous musicians have made their start at Gruene Hall and often come back frequently to relax and entertain.

The night we were there, Jerry Jeff Walker was in the…

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Added by Stefani Twyford on June 6, 2012 at 1:34pm — No Comments

The Importance of Acknowledging Your Employees

This article, in an edited format, was written for the Houston Business Journal and ran in it’s “Best Places to Work” issue in July of 2008. I am sharing this as I never posted it to my blog when it originally written.”

Employee acknowledgment is one of the best tools a company can use for creating a work environment that fosters loyalty and stimulates high achievement. Put simply, people appreciate and respond to recognition. They are motivated by praise, which validates and…

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Added by Stefani Twyford on May 31, 2012 at 6:43pm — No Comments

A Tribute To My Mother – Mother’s Day 2012

This past weekend was Mother’s Day. I had a lovely day with my oldest son and husband. We had lunch and went to see The Hunger Games which I enjoyed. My favorite thing to do is watch movies so if you’re wanting to do something special for me, take me to a movie, pretty much any movie, and I will be happy.

Lots of my friends were posting messages on Facebook and Twitter about Mother’s Day. Some were photos and little tributes to their own mothers while some were photos of them spending…

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Added by Stefani Twyford on May 16, 2012 at 9:38pm — No Comments

How Much Should You Pay A Personal Historian?

Dan Curtis, my friend and fellow Personal Historian in Victoria, BC, recently penned this excellent blog posting on determining the costs of a personal history. This article tackles head-on, the perceived discrepancies of pricing when shopping for a historian. From the buyer’s point of view, it can often be difficult shopping for this service as in their mind, they’re just looking for a tribute, and may not appreciate the vast range of options available today. Dan has attempted to provide…

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Added by Stefani Twyford on April 9, 2012 at 11:23am — No Comments

Our Top Six Online Memorial Websites

It’s human nature to want to memorialize someone who has recently died. We want people to know who they were by allowing friends and family to come together and provide thoughts, insights and memories of the departed. Online, this is big business. This is because it can be shared all over the world and provides a platform that everyone can access, at any time.Here is my list of some of the top online memorial websites and obituary tribute websites. They are not ranked in any order of…

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Added by Stefani Twyford on March 15, 2012 at 11:13am — No Comments

Pre-Production and Planning Tips for Making Better Family Videos

Part 3 of a series about capturing the joy of family events on video

Last week we covered the first of four phases used in creating multimedia productions to capture the joy of family events – concepting / scriptwriting. This week, I we will talk about phase two – pre-production and planning.

As Hal Landen puts it in his book…

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Added by Stefani Twyford on February 24, 2012 at 10:53am — No Comments

2012 World Storytelling Day – March 20

Who are we? Besides living organisms, we are a story, the details (sub-stories) are connected to other people’s stories and they are part of community stories, family stories, national stories…. you get where I’m going here.

I have always seen life from the perspective that there are the facts of what happened, and what we make those facts mean. The sum of those two things are our stories. They make up who we are, how we see the world, how others come to know us, and what we think of…

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Added by Stefani Twyford on February 15, 2012 at 3:05pm — No Comments

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