With January just a couple days away, the annual goal-setting season has officially begun. Between personal, academic or professional goals, I have found it easy to be overwhelmed by the positive overhaul I want to make to my life. A goal on my list is to make a greater effort to document my family’s history. Here are the reasons why you too should add this goal to your 2025 list (and why it’s actually very doable!):
Modern technology makes recording and sharing family history easier than ever.
Before the Cloud, home videos and photos were stored on VHS tapes, cassette tapes, individual photo slides, scrapbooks and DVDs. These forms made sharing content with family members more difficult, since these forms were previously hard to copy and distribute. Thanks to technological advancements, family history documents have never been more accessible.
Digital conversion allows for home videos, audio files and photographs to be scanned and digitized into a JPEG, MP3 or MP4 file, which can be downloaded, emailed, Airdropped, texted, or uploaded to social media. For larger files, such as a life story documentary of your loved one, videos can be accessed through a link that can be shared with your entire family, allowing everyone to download and hold onto those precious family memories. Instead of waiting until large family parties to gather everyone around the TV to watch VHS tapes and hold slides up to the light to try to see the whole image, those memories can be saved to any phone, computer, flash drive or storage device and accessed anytime.
Not to mention, over time, these physical formats degrade, and the process can accelerate if they’re stored in poor conditions, such as a hot attic or a damp basement. Heat, humidity, and exposure to light can cause tapes to warp, fade, and even become unplayable. The magnetic material on tapes, for example, can break down, leading to a loss of both sound and image quality—or in some cases, permanent damage. By converting these formats to digital, you ensure that your memories are protected from the ravages of time and environmental factors, giving them a much longer lifespan and making them accessible for future generations.
Recording family history shows your loved ones that their stories matter.
We have met a lot of wonderful people this year as we have filmed their life story documentary. The most heartwarming result of the life story documentary process was the gratitude that each person expressed for you: their child, grandchild, spouse or friend who booked the interview for them.
Through these interviews, the people you love are both told and shown that their story, their experiences and their memories matter and are worth documenting. The smiles, the personal histories, the photographs, the home videos, the tales of overcoming hardship against all odds—they are all worth being preserved. Taking this step forward to record their story is an amazing reminder that they are worth remembering.
Helping your family members connect with their roots has a positive effect on their wellbeing.
A 2022 article in Frontiers in Psychology by Alexa Elias and Adam D. Brown summarized the part that intergenerational family stories play in wellbeing. Citing a previous study, Elias & Brown state, “Intergenerational family stories may be a catalyst for increasing cohesion among family members, especially as children age and begin to take active roles in contributing to the intergenerational recounting.” In other words, storytelling is at the root of creating stronger family bonds. The article also found that intergenerational family storytelling can contribute to psychological wellbeing, a sense of identity, connection to culture and higher self-esteem. These are benefits that we can all enjoy through documenting and sharing family history.
Feeling inspired? At Planted Media, we are happy to help to capture your family memories through our digital conversion service and life story documentaries. Email us at hello@plantedmediaco.com to learn more!
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