When my father passed away in July 2020, I was unable to return from the US, where I now live, for his funeral. If I had been able to get a flight, I would have spent his service doing the mandatory quarantine.
My wife, Dona, and I will always regret not being able to attend but there were so many far more adversely affected by the pandemic.
My Dad’s partner of more than 30 years, Anne, and siblings, Jenni and David, bore the brunt of the arrangements but asked if I could prepare a photo reel tribute. It was not an onerous task and at least in some small way I could contribute. The only problem was, where do I find the material?
Like great Grandma Gilbert’s dark and heavy furniture and Mum’s Laminex kitchen table, photo albums have lost their place in today’s world, gathering dust in cupboards, or boxed in the garage.
At funerals – whether by copies pinned to a board or a digital file scrolling continuously on a screen – it is common to hear much reminiscing, memories jogged, and anecdotes told. “What a great photo!” will be heard many times.
Fortunately, my Dad loved his “gadgets”. Before scanners became an everyday household object, he had purchased one and set about the task of digitising our family photos and slides from the days of his own childhood, adolescence, adulthood, marriage and through all our marriages and children.
He gave us all a disk with the images sorted into appropriate folders. What a blessing it was to find this after turning several cupboards inside out!
Thanks to the wonders of the internet, I found a simple program [in this instance www.pholody.com: Free Online Photo Slideshow Maker] that allowed me to display 90 or so of these images against a soundtrack of two of his favourite songs: Rock Around the Clock and There’s a Bright Golden Haze on the Meadow.
It was a digital snapshot, if you will, of Dad’s life – and so many others that accompanied him on the journey – from small boy to young man, from young man to father, from father to grandfather, and everything in between. A collation of hopes and dreams, triumphs, and tragedies, those loved and lost and, finally, the contentment of a job well done.
I did not have access to the original family albums so if Dad had not made the effort to scan them, the reel, as it was, would not have been possible. I may have had the odd old photo but largely it would have been a scrabble through all our phone files. In that event, Dad’s tribute likely would have suggested he was never younger than 60!
So, it asks the question: how do we preserve our own little piece of the past? Clearly many people do – family tree websites are in abundance – but there would be just as many who have scant recollection of what their grandparents looked like and where they lived, and no idea whatsoever of aunts, uncles, and various cousins.
It would likely come as a jolt to realise their parents were not always aligned with them but once upon a time moved in the orbit of another familial and friend universe.
As a collector and dealer in antique images I trawl auctions and estate sales and far too often find old family photograph albums consigned for sale to strangers – compendiums of generational history that have now lost all meaning.
For those of us acutely aware of the pile of albums sitting in dark or musty places, life is full of surprises and there is no time like now to do the work.
Scanning the photos is the hard part – it is time intensive and repetitive – but, once digitised, the photos can be stored on a disk, thumb drive or your desktop and easily copied and shared.
When the time comes to make a tribute, or to create a special gift, there is a plethora of slideshow programs readily available on the internet from basic (my style!) to professional.
So, take a day, a few days, a week, a month and scan those photos. Refamiliarise yourself with those faces from the past and label what you can.
Maybe have your kids, or grandkids, help and let them see there actually was a world full of life before theirs.
They may come to appreciate that taking a photo was not always done on a phone; that taking a photo was once reserved to record special events and occasions; that taking a photo required some thought and arduous minutes of posing; that taking a photo cost money and sometimes did not work out, and of course, that taking a photo once caused parents everywhere to boil over at silly faces pulled.
Dad’s passing was inevitable but unwelcome all the same. Living far from home I would think of him as the Dad I talked with weekly on Skype – older, a little forgetful, fragile. Now, all I have of him are the memories, so I watch his photo reel frequently; bittersweet but so glad to have it.
Those images remind me of what time forgot. Dad was young once too. He had a full life – well lived, well loved. He was the man I always thought could move mountains.
