It started with an obsession
Unlike many people I know, our family have very little to no official historical records prior the 1900s.
Example I was always fascinated when I have classmates who went to school with me and they would tell stories like, "My great, great grandfather came from Maniago, Italy to work at the paper factory in the 1800s. Now uncle own the best pizza restaurant in town and I go to Italy every year for 6 months to spend time with relatives still there and practice speaking Italian".
The inner child in me goes, "That is COOL!!!" He knows the history and his root - and he even goes to his roots that have stayed in touched for like a century.
Some my distant relatives have tried to draw a family tree tracing back the initial adventurers who boarded ships to Africa, in the 1600s's & 1700's from modern day UK & The Netherlands, but the accuracy remains questionable.
I've spent countless days myself, researching whatever I could find myself online, coming across sites like Fifty First Years, WikiTree and MyHeritage where there's enough information to make vague assumptions, but we can't be 100% that it's related to us or just another Langeveld.
Of course, there's not much I can do about not having the past information in detail, that doesn't involve me making sketchy assumptions or do scammy ancestry DNA tests - but at minimum, I want to preserve the resources and media we actually do have at our disposal, to avoid my future kids from yet another missing chapter.
I have to start somewhere!
Thankfully we live in a time, where preserving information have become the easiest it's ever been. We no longer need to carry around physical documents, that's bound to get lost or damaged along the way and of course can be accessed from anywhere.
Almost forgotten tapes
Growing up, my dad always had his Sony Video 8 camcorder around, filming occasions - till about the time where phones started shipping with built in camera's.
Christmas, beach holidays, Ratanga Junction (the now defunct Cape Town equivalent of Disneyland), birthdays etc we all have it on tape. He would film the holiday and usually a couple of weekends later we'd sit in front of the TV and watch the footage for the first time, as it's being copied over to a VHS tape and chucked into a box, often never to be looked at again for far too long.
Early 2017, we helped my grandfather move out of his house to move to Jeffrey's Bay in a granny-flat at my Aunt's garden as he no longer wanted to live alone. I came across a VCR (aka VHS Player) in his garage we were clearing and suddenly I thought of that box with home videos, something that hasn't crossed my mind in far too long.
I haven't watched them in years, does our tapes even work still? Does the VCR even work? I think I can digitalise them - we have to!
Turns out the VCR worked and with the advice of my grandfather (because I'm an analog technology noob) we cleaned the heads of the VCR from dust to avoid damaging anything we're about to put into it and there we are, we have a functioning VCR.
I ordered one of these RGB to USB capture devices online and it was time to revive those old home videos into h.264 video files!
21 tapes later, totalling about 60 hours of footage that I had to play through, I have them all backed up on my iCloud, Google Drive and on a 64gb flash drive in the fire safe - we're not losing this.
This exercise ended with great results and of course peace of mind. I can share it with family & friends in different parts of the country and abroad. Convenient!
Moving on to imperfect photos
Like many (I guess), my parents have a cupboard full of photo albums and shoeboxes filled with unorganised photos.
Unlike digital photos that gets captured on your iPhone or digital camera, with instant meta data, like a timestamp & geo-location, with a physical photo, unless it's really obvious or have a vivid memory of the occasion, you generally have no background about it. But also that's what makes it so interesting. It lets you think about the story behind it with only the photos as your context.
There's thousands of photos so my brain gives it a shot by mentally trying think of the story behind them:
- dad as a kid,
- a birthday,
- cousin's I guess,
- baby Ronald,
- Ronald first day of school,
- mum as a kid,
- xmas,
- unknowns,
- Tokyo 1980's,
- more birthdays,
- who is this drunk guy?,
- dad at Uni,
- I definitely didn't want to see this photo.
It's like time travelling through decades, filled with different emotions.
Over the past year I tried to continue my digitalisation project, by scanning as many photos as possible and store them onto the cloud.
It's an absolutely mental process that requires the patience of a saint.
My dad always said "Ronald was first in line when patience was handed out" - referring to me teaching my grandfather how to use Limewire and transfer music to the iPod I gave him in the mid 2000s.
Here I am manually taking thousands of photos out of albums one by one and then packing them onto the scanner, scanning them, and then putting them back into the albums. It's a lot of work indeed.
And there's still many boxes and albums waiting for me to scan them when I'm visiting again.
However, just like the videos it took me back to what feels like a different world. It was absolutely worth it.
Left: me using my feet. Right: My brother and I experiencing snow for the first time, 8 July 1996.
There's something pretty special about photos taken with film. We are so used to instantly taking technologically perfect photos with our iPhones and modern digital cameras with auto colour balance, correct exposure, ISO & auto focus - things that was borderline a miracle if you managed to have everything to align when you hit the shutter at the right moment. And then you can only see them after you get them developed, which could be weeks if not months.
To an extent it's these great imperfections that makes these photos really special and find something unique in every one of them, combined with a memory & a story.
The true throwbacks
We had a family trip to visit my grandfather in Jeffrey's Bay for his 90th birthday in April 2019.
On that trip my aunt managed to borrow a 35mm photo projector from somewhere so we can have a "slideshow night" and show my grandfather photos he probably haven't seen in many, many years.
As boring as it may sound, my grandfather was a Korean War Veteran and a keen photographer at the time, so majority of the photos that we went through, was photos he took over the course of something like 2 years in Korea, Japan, Hong Kong & Singapore.
Left: Boeing C-97 cargo plane displaying on a slide, in my aunts living room. Right: Tokyo, Japan ± 1953
The kind of photos that anybody mildly interested in history & photography will drool over. Wikipedia in a box!
At the time, I had no idea these photos even existed. It's the kind of photos I would struggle to find online, so it's really special.
Digitalising these slides will be my next great project.
There's hundreds of these slides in a box that needs to be scanned. I suppose first challenge would be acquiring a high resolution 35MM slide scanner because that doesn't seem all too common these days.
But it's just photos? Yes, absolutely.
But the power of a single photo, video or slide can transport us back to a different time, revealing stories and experiences that often directly shape our lives.
ChatGPT came to the rescue, because I asked it to explain what I just had going through my mind, as I was trying explain the point I was trying to make about preserving all the history you have for your offspring, which ended up feeling like an minor epiphany.
If my grandfather didn't spontaneously decide to volunteer in Korea to join the Airforce in the 1950's I'd probably never have had the opportunity to live there in my early 20's & be a place very close to my heart.
If my mom didn't take the chance to apply for a job as a diplomat to be based in Japan before I was born, and got me growing up constantly talking about it, I probably wouldn't have had any interest even going to Easy Asia, who the hell knows.
These photos and videos sort of puts the puzzle together. Even the oldest of photos has a story that can have a connection to some form of familiarity today.
Preserve what you have, and pass it down. You will never know what epic correlations can and will be realised down the line, often from a new perspective.
All backed up
For now, iCloud Photos + shared albums will have to do. I don't think it's perfect, but it's probably the easiest and most reliable way to store thousands of photos and can be accessed again quickly.
