Charleston Women-Winter 2020

www.CharlestonWomen.com | www.ReadCW.com | www.CharlestonBrides.com CW H ow many of us have landed a stockpile of family photos and documents from grandmother’s trunk, and we simply tucked them away into boxes to deal with another day? Add to those the thousands of pictures on our phones of kids, friends and travels, and it can seem overwhelming. Who has the spare time or even the inclination to identify and label them all? Plus, we’re in the social media age, right? Snap a photo, upload it and forget it. Vintage print pictures on paper are so yesterday. But wait — not so fast. Every generation in a family needs at least one person who holds onto the family genealogy and heirloom photos. Some of these images are irreplaceable. Scanning and digitizing them will save them for the future generations. That day has come for many of us. A pandemic lockdown and work-from-home sentence have freed up time to tackle projects like this. Several websites and services can be helpful with managing these treasure troves of photography. The advice is to start small, focus and tackle the task in digestible chunks. For these archives, you’ll want to save the pictures in two places, such as your computer, plus an external hard drive or in the cloud. As Mount Pleasant resident Anne Janas said, “It wasn’t until I was in my 40s that I took a real interest in the past and my family’s past. That’s when I began to treasure the family story.” For a reunion a couple of years ago, which gathered 57 members of her family, Janas compiled a slide presentation featuring the lives of their grandparents and BY ANNE SEMMES How to Archive Family Stories with Photos Worth a Thousand Words