Preserving Family Memories

You all know that I’m close to my family.  It happens naturally, I think, as we get older to appreciate our family heritage more than ever. At least it’s been that way for me.  I so appreciate the parents I have and having family pictures and memories to hold on to is just priceless.

My family was not wealthy at all when I was growing up.  We still aren’t, but we are blessed with much more than material wealth.  Coming from a loving family means more to me now that I ever dreamed it would when I was a young girl growing up.  I didn’t realize just how precious my family was until later years when I found out that not everyone has those wonderful loving family memories to cherish.  So, now at this stage in life, keeping the family history has become important to me.  It’s been a joy for me on this blog for the last almost 10 years, to document and highlight our family events on here.  That’s been so great!  I probably have more pictures than I ever would have taken if not for blogging.  Pictures are just a natural part of that and a part of family gatherings.

So, how to preserve those old family memories that many of us have laying around?  We didn’t have home movies growing up.  In fact, there are very few pictures of me and my sister at a young age. We have a few of us as babies and little girls, but not nearly the pictures that folks have now.  With our digital phones always ready and digital cameras being so popular the last few years, there’s no excuse now not to preserve those precious moments of family history.

Let me introduce you to Legacybox, who is sponsoring this post.  There’s an offer at the bottom so that you can preserve your family memories too, so I hope you’ll stick around to read that part!

The only thing we had growing up was slides and real photos.  My mom has albums of some older family photos and some of us growing up, taken with a real camera, but the most special ones were slides that my dad took when we were very small, from birth to around age 5 or so for me.  I can remember getting out that little slide viewer when I was younger and putting those slides in there, holding it up to my eye, and shutting one of them to see the moments of my childhood in color.  That was the only way I ever saw these slides, they were never printed into pictures. That’s a shame, but it’s the truth.

So, as I mentioned above when a company called Legacybox reached out about working with me on a post, I thought of those slides.  I could finally get them digitally saved and look at them on the computer.  I asked mom to get them out and I went through all those slides and packed them away in a box to Legacybox and sent them off, along with a packet of old family photos, which were also digitally saved.  I had enough stickers to use for 10 items and since Mark had old VCR videos of his girls growing up, we sent off 4 of those to be digitally saved to a CD as well.

Here’s what I love about Legacybox.  They send you everything you need in a box, packed inside another cardboard box, along with stickers that go on your items, which then get sent in prepaid.  You can send in VHS tapes to Super 8 film, slides and photos and get them digitally preserved and view them again and again.  Those old formats of home movies don’t have to go to waste!

See those barcodes on the items in my box?  That means they are tracked for safe keeping.

It was so fun to get them back and plug them into the computer and look at them all again!  Legacybox makes it really easy.  I added a little sticker on each piece of material, from the photos to the VCR tapes and boxes of slides.  The box is carefully packaged back up and sent out to them prepaid. They are in Chattanooga, TN by the way, which I thought was interesting.  It was back to me within a week, along with my originals.

On these CD’s are old movies for Mark’s girls and on that jump drive are all the slides and photos of my family.

Of course, I’m going to share some of those photos that were slides with y’all!  It was so fun to get to see these blown up on the screen on my computer for the first time!  My family enjoyed seeing these again for the first time in many years.

Me as a baby in Virginia, where we lived my first year.

My sister and I with mom.

Mom, dad, and my sister, Renee.  I remember seeing that floral sofa through the viewfinder when I was little. That was some patterned sofa!

Me and my sister.  I love seeing how things were decorated back in the mid-fifties. I totally remember that green lamp being somewhere in our house growing up.

Me and my sister again.

I know you know who this dapper young man is, right?

He grew up to marry my beautiful mama.  She was so pretty as a young woman and still beautiful as an older senior lady.

The whole family in the fifties.  There’s that floral sofa again!

We had moved to Florida by this time and I was about 4 here.  My dad pastored a church in the panhandle of Florida until I was 6 and we moved to Georgia.  Mom made all our clothes when we were little, including her own.

We lived on this dirt road in an old parsonage, with the church next door.  I have lots of memories of this place.  See that giant oak in the distance.  That thing was so huge and we climbed up in the middle of it all the time where it was flat.  I played up there a lot.  That’s my cousin, Jacque, in the red and I’m getting the mail.

Renee, mom and I at Easter.  Remember when Easter Sunday was a really big deal?  Mom sewed these Easter dresses and her dress, she was quite the seamstress.

Ah yes, we were well dressed little pastel Easter dress girls!

The family at the Zoo in Florida.  I had a traumatic event happen at this zoo which I think was this exact trip and a monkey reached out of the cage after everyone walked away and I was still standing there.  He grabbed the bottom of my dress and as I backed away to get out of there, he yanked the dress and it started tearing at the seams.  I was pretty shook up over that as I was screaming for my mama!

Playing outside on my tricycle.  I remember lots of happy times in this little town and it was where I started first grade at age 5.

You can see where my mom got her love of cooking.  My grandmother Kittie on the left was a good cook too.  She died at age 59 and I never knew her, since I was really small when she passed away of a heart attack. She had heart issues for many years.

Mom’s parents (Clarence and Kittie) and younger brother, Guy, who has also passed away in the last few years.

My dad’s parents, Brice and Lovie. I figured they had to be in their 60’s in this picture, since it was late 1950’s, but they look so much older.  Amazing how that generation worked so hard and it showed!

My Grandpa, the way I remember him the most, with a pipe in his mouth.  We used to strike the match and light his pipe for him.

And this idyllic shot of mom, me, and Renee, along with my cousin Billy’s family, my dad’s nephew, who passed away a couple of years ago.  This picture looks like the perfect shot of the 50’s, doesn’t it?  My dad was obviously taking the picture.  It’s amazing that all these slides got taken and the box put away and never developed into prints.  It’s been so fun to see them all again, this time in a bigger format on the computer.

There is nothing like family pictures to preserve memories and show the younger generation where they came from.  We lose touch so fast with previous generations, but I’m happy to know something about my grandparents, even though I didn’t grow up near them and had limited visits with them.  My parents are the product of their parents and I’m grateful for their long marriage and steadfast love that was passed down to my sister and our entire family.  Lauren loved looking at these old pictures that she has never seen before!

If you have family memories you’d like to preserve, take a look at Legacybox and you won’t be disappointed in the product.  Click over to Legacybox to get your Legacybox started! Use the code: SOUTH at checkout to receive 40% off your order! Offer expires 11/15.

It’s been a fun walk down memory lane for our family and wonderful to finally see these slides in a bigger format.

Note: This post is sponsored by Legacybox. The thrill of seeing our family pictures restored and able to be viewed is priceless to us! 

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