John Hudson wrote:
>&> Here is an interesting piece from tomorrow's Daily Telegraph [London, UK]
>&> about the preservation of digital memories.
>&>
>&> http://tinyurl.com/pspquwe
>&>
>&> I've yet to be unconvinced that hardcopy is the only way to go.
>&>
>&> jh
I'm with John on this one.
As the eldest son of the eldest daughter of the eldest daughter, I have
inherited a
barrow-load of family documents ( certificates of births death and marriages)
and also photos
going back to at least 1880.
My mind is being exercised as to what to do with these.
Two days ago I realised (correctly, as it turned out) that maybe the children
of my Mother's
only brother didn't have very much, if any, of what I have.
I even have the long tresses of my mother's mothers, that my mother who used to
brush
them every day cut off before her mother died at our home in 1943. They are in
amazingly
good shape. Long enough for her to sit on when they were still attached ..
My mother's uncle was sent from NZ to the Boer war (and I have a photo taken in
South
Africa), from which he deserted and went to Melbourne in Australia. There he
was blinded in
a blasting accident, and lived as a blind person for 25 years. He used to write
in great
secrecy to his three sisters,; always in pencil, not always very sharp; and I
have some of
those letters ... Died in the 1940's His employer managed to get 35 pounds
Australian from
the government as some kind of compensation - that was equivalent to 50% of his
annual
income ... I have three penned copperplate letters from his former employer.
So I am about to re-photograph much of this material for my cousin. I even have
the B&W
(127 format??) negatives for many of these shots. My mother kept them in the
original
envelopes from the chemist.
Once I get this stuff re-photographed I will probably make multiple copies.
One important difference between then and now is the sheer volume of numbers of
photos
currently versus the parsimony of the 1880's regarding making photographs and
copies of
them.
This alone mitigates against people trying to look at them in the future.
ALSO, I am So glad that one day ( obviously) not long before the quite
unforeseen death of
my Mother, I spent many hours with her writing in ink on the backs of the
prints, just who the
people and places were, and I have the knowledge to put these into context.
Try that with digital images, unless you do what I do and write notes in the
image, which can
be read by FastStone Image viewer ( but not Picture Information Extractor). If
I put these
images on CDs, I will probably include an installable copy of FS, with
instructions ..
As an aside, in a fit of madness or something, over the Christmas period I
actually paid for
FS, and also Avast antivirus. Must have been a lingering mental effect of that
bad cold I had
and am nearly over !!
But I am still agonising over what to do for the best regarding archiving this
old material. At
age 75 I have only an unknown limited number of years/days to act. It bugs me.
Brian Swale
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