What is holding you hostage?

You may have read the title of this entry and thought “What??? No one is holding me hostage.”

That may be true, but that’s not always going to be the case.  (And no, that’s not some idol threat, it’s going to happen to everyone.)

The fact is that our children are holding us hostage – in the same way that we are holding our parents hostage.  Remember all of those old pictures that are in your basement or attic or in some file folder somewhere?  Do you realize that in many cases, they may be the last and only photographic reference to those people IN HUMAN HISTORY???

Guess who is in charge of those photos right now – yep, you.  And you alone will decide the fate of those pictures, references and evidence of your forbears.  And in the same way – even though your pictures might be digital and they might be on your computer, your kids will be responsible for whether those pictures are archived correctly and accurately or if they go straight to the recycle bin and trashed because there is no connection between your kids and your pictures.

A few entries back, I referenced Edna Parker, the oldest woman on the face of the earth right now.  She was born in 1893 and she turned 115 not too long ago.  Because of her longevity – and those who were born after her that have lived to this generation – it’s possible for all of the people she ever knew to be digitally remembered for all time.  Camcorders, digital cameras, scanners and digital media like flash drives and burnable CD’s allow us to record for all time the stories and images of our families and our loved ones.

So when you look at those old pictures in your attic or basement or wherever they might be, know that you are not only holding a picture, but you are holding photographic evidence that someone you know or never knew once existed on the earth.  You hold the key to whether or not that photo is captured or destroyed – and doing nothing would point to the latter.

And remember this too – involving your kids in the process of saving your family history will mean that they will treat your photos the same way.

The side of the family we don’t talk about

When you go about putting together your family history and you take out all of the memoirs and photographs and any other memorabilia that belongs to your family, all of it together paints a pretty average portrait.

Until you start digging.  That’s where the good stuff is.  You will find out that your family isn’t exactly that pinnacle of modern decency nor would you define some of your family members as even honest.  And if you feel like you’ve hit a dead end, there is one source that people don’t often go to in order to find out more about their family history.  Sure, you can find birth records, death records, marriages, kids, vital records, land records and any number of good common records that most anyone will have.

Have you checked for criminal records?

A ha!  Touched a nerve?  Yeah, 1 percent of the entire population of America is right now behind bars.  Which means that one of your great-great-great granparents proabably did a few things their mother didn’t want them to.  And since crime tends to run in the family, if you find one member of your family in trouble with the law, chances are you will find a few more.  I can tell you of at least two family members I know of that spent time behind bars and evaded the authorities for a number of years.

So if you are running into dead ends with your searches, try hitting the local courthouse or library to look up criminal bookings and court proceedings – you might turn up some very interesting information there.

Miley Cyrus writes her memoirs…

Making the decision to write one’s memiors is sometimes a difficult one because some believe that they don’t want to write their memiors too early.

Apparently that’s not a problem for Miley Cyrus.

Hannah Montana herself is letting the world know of her experiences as a young girl in a forthcoming publication from Disney/Hyperion books.  The press release on Yahoo.com gives these details:

“The Disney Book Group, in a clear bit of synergy for the Walt Disney Co., has world rights to the book. Disney said Cyrus’ book will feature previously unseen photos, family stories and ‘a look at her inner circle of loved ones.’”

For those unaware of Cyrus’ contributions to mainstream culture, the daughter of country singer/songwriter Billy Ray Cyrus stars in the hit Disney series Hannah Montana which airs on Saturday mornings on ABC.  The series chronicles the life of a young girl whose alter ego is a rock star and is so successful that Disney took the show on the road producing sellout concerts mostly attended by younger girls.

I would think that 15 is a little young for someone to start writing their memoirs, but not too young to start a journal or diary.  Then when the time comes to write the memoirs, you have lots of memories to recall if you’ve kept up with your journaling.

For more on the release, click here.

http://music.yahoo.com/read/news/45612992

The FTM Newsletter…

If you’re interested in preserving your family history, log onto http://www.familytimemachine.com/newsletter.php and sign up to get our newsletter.  You’ll get free tips that will help you uncover your family history, stories from our blog, restorations, an inspirational quotation and a coupon good for a discount on FTM services.  The newsletter comes every Tuesday morning in your Inbox.

If preserving family history is something that you are passionate about, this is one newsletter you can’t afford not to have.  For more information about the newsletter or The Family Time Machine, e-mail us at info@familytimemachine.com.

Photo Restoration Made Easy

Right now on familytimemachine.com, you can have an old photo restored via the internet – and the photo doesn’t have to leave your home.

All you need to do is follow these simple steps and we’ll restore the photo for you.

1. Scan the photo at 300 dpi resolution and save it with a name that has no spaces in it (ex: johnson-4-bday.jpg)

2. Go to http://www.familytimemachine.com/restore.php and click on the link on that page to start the process.

3. Fill out the information and upload the file.

4. We will contact you to go over exactly what you want done to the photo and to give you a price quote.

5. You confirm the price quote and we will start work on the photo.

6. You will recieve a watermarked finished copy of the photo for your approval.

7. If you approve, we will send you through our automatic payment system where you can pay via credit card or PayPal.

8. Once we recieve payment, we will send you a link to download the finished, high resolution photo and you can print it out on your own printer.

It’s that simple and you hardly have to do anything but scan your photo!

Alive before what???

Edna Parker will turn 115 years old on Sunday – she is the oldest living person alive on earth right now.  We should all be so lucky.  Parker was born in 1893 and is part of a demographic of people called “supercentarians” or people who live over the age of 110.  The only negatives about her life are that she saw her husband pass before her - 70 years ago - and both of her sons passed before her.   But those sons also gave her 5 grandchildren, 13 great grand children and 13 more great great grandchildren whose pictures adorn her Shelbyville, Indiana nursing home room.

Here’s a trip for you historians.  All of these events happened after Parker was born.

W. K. Dickson applied for a US Patent for motion picture film.

Coca-Cola started selling their product in bottles.

The United States Supreme Court officially declares the tomato a vegetable.

Kokichi Mikimoto develops the method to seed and grow cultured pearls.

Ghandi had his first act of disobedience.

Norman Rockwell was born.

Georgianna Drew Barrymore died. (Great Great grandmother of actress Drew Barrymore).

The Biltmore House in Ashville, NC was opened.

Babe Ruth was born.

The first professional football game was played in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.

And guess what she’s getting for her birthday?  A photo album.

To read more about Edna Parker, click the following link.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080418/ap_on_he_me/oldest_human_research

The British side of 13 Days…

Remember the Kevin Costner film “13 Days” – the epic journey of 13 days in October of 1962 that was later termed the Cuban Missle Crisis?  It’s a very good film if you’d like to check it out someday at your local video store or movie service.

One of the most critical times in the history of the planet, those 13 days have been, since then, the benchmark for how close we have come to a serious, all-out nuclear war. 

But the crisis was not just the United States vs. the Soviet Union/Cuba with the rest of the world being innocent bystandards.  There was at least one significant player that gets overlooked in this critical historical moment: England.

This week, the Royal Air Force (RAF) unveiled a relic from the Cold War era, a reminder of how close the world came to a cataclysmic situation.  The Vulcan XH558, a bomber that was fitted with Britian’s nuclear arsenal, flew again.

For those uninitiated with English airborne weaponry, the Vulcan looks a lot like the Concorde, but with more robust lines and obviously a more military look.  They were taken out of service in 1984 and were never flown again – until this week.  A 14-year restoration project brought one of the big birds back to the runway and in less than a minute, it took to the skies once again.

If you’d like to see a picture of the Vulcan and read the full story, click the link below.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7351628.stm

 

The old icebreaker…

If your home caught on fire and you had enough time to run in and get one thing before the fire enveloped the home, what would it be?

If your answer is a two dimensional object – like a picture or a collection of pictures such as a baby book, wedding book, scrapbook or other memorabilia – you need a scanner.

The two greatest inventions for people who are looking to save items like those, are as follows.

1. A scanner.

2. A flash drive.

You might look at a scanner and think that it is a relatively useless piece of equipment that you might use every once in a while – perhaps if you got a scanner/copier, you would use it more for the latter option.  But scanners were built for one reason: to transfer physical analog images into digital representations.  Let’s face it.  Every photo we have that is in printed or developed form is going to fade, deteriorate and eventually disintegrate into dust over time.  Every single one of them, bar none.  If you want to save them and keep the

Someone recently told me, “But if I scan them, then I won’t have the original – and the original means more to me than one I can print out.”  I hate to sound morbid about this, but the original will eventually disintegrate unless you put it in an airtight glass-enclosed container that is impervious to light and temperature changes.

That’s the security the Declaration of Independence is under right now – and even it is losing it’s structure by the year.

In short, get the pictures you have scanned NOW because they will deteriorate – they could even be destroyed tomorrow by a fire where you can’t run in and save them.  If you wait six months, the picture will show that much more wear and tear to whatever you expose it to – light, heat, cold, gnats, mice, rodents, insects, water, fire or any combination of those.

Flash drives are incredibly useful because they can store the data of scanned pictures and give you the security that you can take them with you – even on a key chain.  Not only that but unlike CD’s or DVD’s, you can take data off of a flash drive and put additional data on without burning another disk. 

These items can be purchased for as little as $100 (combined) to as much as $400 (depending on how many features you want with the scanner that can also functions as a copier, printer, fax machine and as a slide scanner).

You don’t have an excuse anymore.  Those items that you wanted to run into the house could have already been saved on a flash drive after being scanned into your computer.  If you’ve already done that, great!

An Edsel….worth $1.76 million???

Edsel Ford, the lone son of automobile maker Henry Ford, had it right all along: an Edsel can sell.

At least one of them can.

The personal automobile of Edsel Ford, the 1934 Ford Model 40 Speedster concept car was found in a garage in Florida not too many years ago.  It was then shipped to Tennessee for a major restoration and auctioned off at Amelia Island, Florida for…yep…1.76 million dollars.  It becomes the most expensive hot-rod ever sold at auction.

To quote the article:

“It’s taken more than 70 years, but Edsel Ford has finally proven his father was wrong about the value of that “sporty job.” Out of sight for 40 years, sympathetically preserved and benefiting from a careful mechanical restoration, Edsel Ford’s Continental Series II Speedster — essentially a hand-built and operational concept car from the 1930s, conceived and designed by two automotive legends — is one of the most famous and well-documented Ford specialty cars in existence.”

To read the entire story on the car itself and it’s amazing restoration, click the link below.

http://www.edmunds.com/insideline/do/Columns/articleId=125411#2

Charlton Heston…

News outlets all over the world today rang out the news that one of Hollywood’s greatest actors has died.  Charlton Heston was indeed a great actor and a very influencial person especially later in his political life with the NRA.

DId you catch all of those video editorials and eulogies to the man that played Moses, Michealangelo and Ben Hur?  Did you ever wonder how quickly the news media put those together after the announcement came that Heston had passed?

Truth is, they took their time putting those together.

Just as the new media is very quick to be on the scene of breaking news, they are also very good at anticipating events and being ready for them – especially the inevitable.

With the passing of Charlton Heston, all of the news media already had produced their vinette on the life history of the famous actor.  The truth is, they were just waiting for the right time to use it.  And evenmoreso, when news of Heston’s death was made public, all the news outlets had to do was the voiceover and include the date and time of death to make the story accurate – if that is all they did.

Not to be incredibly morbid about this kind of journalism, but we can also do the same thing when it comes to our loved ones.  Just recently, I was at a meeting where a man told me that a relative of his was near death.  In anticipating the event, a granddaughter had come up with the idea of having a 5-6 minute film at the funeral that celebrated the life of the dying woman. 

It’s anticipatory behavior like this that also makes the grieving process a bit easier to take – when you know the inevitable is going to happen and you can prepare yourself for it.  These are things that we can do to let us know the impact one has had on our lives – and show how important they were to us.  But more importantly, doing these things also shows our elder relatives that we love them (and loved them) enough to do this for them.

Consider this the next time you are faced with having to plan a funeral for a loved one – even well in advance of any date that could be anticipated.  And if you need any help, contact us today and we can help answer any questions that you might have or help you complete the project.