1. My parents among about 25 other hippie teens as they cavort in West Hudson Park in Kearny, NJ, including laying themselves out on a grassy hill in the shape of a peace sign, and other dancing around. (part of which was intended to be set to the theme Hey Hey, We’re the Monkees) as they kids came bounding over a hill top.
2. A skit where two guys are approached by a pusher, score some weed, sneak off to enjoy it, are approached by a cop, who proceeds to get high with them before they all skip off arm in arm.
3. A musical or theatre troupe maybe in Central Park.
4. My mom and a friend waving good bye to their friends who are on the way to Woodstock, August 15, 1969, followed by their footage of arriving at Woodstock and some scenes of the crowd before a shot of people bathing in a pond at the concert.
5. A shot of Fillmore East
6. A 6 1/2 minute video of my Dad’s band, Black Forest Rhodes performing at Rutgers Newark Campus, which I just uploaded to YouTube.

I’m planning to post some more parts of the video to YouTube, so I can share them without using up all my bandwidth, because I think they are cool vintage films that a lot more people might enjoy seeing. I was in the midst of messing around with the video, trying to get it exported to the correct format when I received an email from Leonard, one of my Wooling cousins. He has been so generous with his photos and especially in taking the time to scan them and share them with the whole family. This last set (of 499 photos) is no exception. Although many of the people are only relatives of mine through distant relations and by marriage, it’s still an amazing collection, and one I hope to help Leonard share with more people. Here are some samples:

I know these pictures are very low quality – it’s something I’m still working on improving. I have discovered that switching my blogs over to WordPress hosting was a big mistake, and I’m still in the process of learning how to move them again, but in a way that would allow me to log in once yet still access both blogs while hosting myself. I’m afraid I’ll mess something up and lose a lot of my work, so I dread climbing up yet another steep and risky learning curve. Still, it was a day of progress with the family archives, so I’m happy about that.

I don’t know why I never used photo albums to begin with – I only had one for some of my high school years. As I accumulated pictures, I kept them in their envelopes, sometimes labeled the envelope, but kept them pretty well organized. If someone came over and we wanted to look at them, I could easily find them, they took up little space, and I would hover over the person, making sure they didn’t mix up the pictures, putting them carefully back in the right spot. If I had albums they wouldn’t match – horrors! I never liked the idea of a whole bunch of different sized albums – as it is I tried to always have matching photo boxes and wound up buying plain white…

In recent years, I found myself showing people pictures and was annoyed that my system didn’t allow for comfortably passing the pictures around.

Here is my table in the midst of the work:

Here is a box of negatives in their folders – I pulled them out from between the pages of the plastic photo sleeve binders, and stored them in the boxes. I used them to make notes of some of the dates for the photos. These negative/photo envelopes were generally dated at the time I brought them home from the developer, often with the dates of specific events recorded on the envelope. Unfortunately, when I moved the photos from the sleeves to the albums, I didn’t always take the label strip that explained the photos.

This is my photo sleeve album – I think it’s great for temporary storage of photos you plan to scrapbook later.

Here are the photos show in their 12 x 12 album page sleeves.

I recommend that you scan any photos you might want to use for any other project. I have my negatives, and I believe my digital files are a decent back up system, though I will need to keep the files and storage method current. I am fine with cutting up my original photos when I know I have digital originals. I wouldn’t do that with precious old pictures, but this works for me. My speed scrapping method is:

1. Each year gets its own album – for most albums this means making several extensions, and I will have to make a new covering for the wide end, but I like it this way.
2. The first page is a photo montage of all the pictures from that year that friends send in birth announcements or Christmas cards, perhaps a list of events from the year, on the back of that page, I put our Christmas newsletter, which includes highlights of the year and some photos from our family.
3. I gather groups of events Chronologically, including 1 – 8 photos per page, depending on the number of pictures I have, their size when cropped, the importance of the event. For example, a big party might get 2 to 4 pages depending on the number of photos, a day at the park maybe one page.
4. I have always been organized. In my collections of stuff I had saved all of my correspondence & every concert ticket stub, so I found myself locating ticket stubs, party & wedding invitations to include with certain pictures.
5. I bought a big pack of assorted 12 x 12 scrapbooking paper (usually with 2 pages of each color) and chose a color that would look nice for each 2 page spread.
6. Then I cropped and glued, leaving a spot for Journaling. Sometimes I just write captions under photos, sometimes I leave a larger area. Sometimes I used templates for 12 x 12 pages, but usually I just aimed for any nice layout that worked with my pictures.
7. For large journaling blocks, I make an appropriately sized text box in word, choose appropriate fonts and colors, and write up a story to be printed out later.
8. If it was a special event, I might include some topical stickers or paper punched accents – but generally I kept it simple. It’s far more important to me that my kids can pick up an album and see their memories, than having the perfectly accessorized scrapbook page. There will always be more to scrapbook!

I am still not sure how I want to scrapbook pictures from my life – I want to do some digital scrapbooking, but haven’t found the right software yet…

I am planning separate albums for Halloween, Our Wedding, Our Home, and each of my sons.

• 1997 – While helping my in-laws clean out their basement, I discover several large boxes of memorabilia from my mother in law Jean’s deceased mother. Jean doesn’t know what to do with them, and gives them to me – I sort through – send the photos out to all the relevant cousins – keeping the precious ones.
• 1998 – My father in law entrusted me with a wooden box full of his father’s photos.
• 1999 – I present my father in law with his birthday gift, my first scrapbook . I organized his photos, affixed them with gold photo corners in a plain black scrapbook album, labeled all with a gold pigment pen.
• 2000 – I present my mother in law with a matching plain black scrapbook album detailing her earliest ancestors down through to her mother’s passing. I got much fancier with this album (see pics)
• October 2001 – I interview my paternal grandmother and record it on digital video tape.
• April 2002 – iPhoto is released. I had previously used iView Media Pro to organize my digital images, but they didn’t have such cool output features, so I eventually stopped using it.
• December 2002 – Trip buys me a scanner for my birthday. It comes with a transparency adapter, and now I don’t have to keep using his scanner up in his office.
• January 2003 – My mother asks me to make a gift album for her mother in law’s 90th birthday party, rather last minute. I buy a spiral bound black page album, call her family requesting a number of specific photos of each child and grandchild (baby, childhood, teen years, marriage), have them Fed-Ex the photos to me. I organize, scan, edit and do a quickie Family History, Trip re-prints the photos at work and I put the album together fast with several autograph pages in the back (alternating with blank pages to include photos from the party). It was a big hit and I was paid nicely.
• February 2003 – my husband surprises me with the most fabulous Valentine’s Day gift ever – a new iMac!
• September 2003 – I attend my friend Sharon’s wedding, video tape it to digital video
• November 2003 – I receive an early birthday gift – my first digital camera!
• January 2004 – I make Sharon’s wedding video in iMovie and burn it to iDVD. Mailed it to her for Valentine’s Day!
• Fall 2004 – As I begin searching through the photo boxes for yet another project, I decide to transfer all photos to 3-hole punched 8 1/2 x 11″ pocket sleeves and store them in 3 ring binders. They fit in about 5 albums. I made a table in Word formatted so that each row will fit in the label pocket of the photo sleeve, and I filed the negatives in their envelopes between the pages. Not ideal – I still have to turn some pictures on their sides to store them, and store extras behind other photos in the sleeves. But it’s a big improvement over the boxes.
• October 2004 – I complete a DVD made to present to my grandmother at her 85th birthday. The interview we made has been edited in iMovie and interspersed with photos of the people and places she tells about. Following the movie portion, a chronological slideshow of family photos spans her ancestry through the current years, and includes all of the children, grandchildren, great grandchildren – I put it to some nice music – not a dry eye in the house! The cheer that rose up as that video ended will stay with me forever! I also gave her two scrapbooks – one of her Heritage and childhood, another of her children and grandchildren. In preparation, I borrowed photo albums from her house, took them out of their damaging acidic albums, went through my entire photo collection looking for pictures she might like, scanned them. Called relatives whose photos I do not have – wrangle them into mailing or delivering pictures to me.
• November 2004 – I make my mother a digital photo slideshow. In preparation I take all of her pictures and scan the good ones, then review my entire collection for pictures she would probably like on her DVD.
• May 2005 – I present my mother with her Heritage Album for Mother’s Day. It is in a 12 x 12 post bound album with plastic sleeves over each page. Much fancier than my previously made scrapbooks. (see pics)
• Summer 2005 – During my in-laws’ move, we un-earth a huge collection of slide carousels representing my father-in-law’s collection spanning the late 60′s through the 80′s. I begin organizing, locate a screen and slide projector (from freecycler) and scan over 300 of these photos.
• Winter 2005 – I give Dad (my father-in-law) a DVD, Travels with Dad (made with iDVD) – containing movies (made in iMovie) of his slide photos from several Disney Vacations, fires he photographed for the Fire Department, four wheeling in the Pinebarrens.
• January 2006 – I first learned about MemoryMiner (from their site: MemoryMiner is a digital storytelling application that lets you zero in on the stories depicted in your photos by linking them to each other based on people, places and time.) Trippy learned about it from a podcast – it won MacWorld’s Best in Show. I have found my new favorite thing. I start mapping my photos.
• February 2006 – Realizing that my children have hardly seen any of their own baby pictures, and that they hardly remember so many of the big events of their lives, I start a huge “speed scrapping” project. I am now committed to 12 x 12 albums – and of course, I buy matching plain black albums. I fully completed the years 2001 through 2003, and have made varying degrees of progress on other years. Midway through I don’t want to continue scrapping, because I want to cut up the originals, but want to scan them first…At this point all photos from 1996 to the present are in 12 x 12 albums, although for some years they are just inserted into a page sleeve, not yet scrapped.
• Spring 2006 – in preparation for a presentation of Family History to the 2nd Grade classes at Elliot’s school, I make my own Heritage album, not completed, but nearly so. The kids love it – and the presentation goes over very well.
• May 2006 – I complete my first MemoryMiner photo display of my family heritage photos. I tried to include all important photos from my direct line ancestors
• Summer 2006 – I decide to make a MemoryMiner photo montage of my life’s photos. I already a lot of photos scanned, but never went through and chose those that were meaningful to me (as I have done with my Grandmother and mother.) I start with my birth, and scan every photo I treasure right through to the days of my digital camera. My final collection includes 370 pictures. I map them, write descriptions, track down some names I’ve forgotten, and make my MemoryMiner display. I love it!
• August 2006 – I created this blog – to document my work and share the process some more.

I have something to share kind of in regard to family history, but not really.  One of my relatives (whom I’ll call Pat) called and asked me to look for some family members that may live in St. Thomas.  Pat is basically estranged from his/her father, but has had contact with other members of the father’s family.  I discovered that St. Thomas does not appear to have a working online white pages.  I made a few phone calls, did a little hunting, and quickly found another relative’s phone number in the US.  Not long after that, I had my first bad experience with contacting a “lost” family member.  I did not say anything insensitive, but it was clear that the woman who answered the phone knew quite well about the relative I mentioned in my message without my saying anything specific.  Frankly, this was all old news, and I wasn’t surprising anyone with an unknown new relative.  However, she was venomous.  I was apologetic.  I told her it was never my intent to disrupt their family or hurt her in any way. She said, “I’m not hurt, I’m very pissed off!” I tried to absorb her anger – let it go right through me – in a way I think I deserved whether I hurt her or angered her, and I wanted to let her take it out on me if she needed to.  I heard her out, she heard me out and then she hung up on me.  I called “Pat’s” mother and told her the deal, called “Pat”, and while hanging up the phone rang again and it was “Pat’s” estranged father.  He had just gotten a very angry phone call from the daughter of his ex-wife…     But he was kind, and calm, and very understanding about the whole thing.  In the end, there are no relatives that we know of to be found.  I can’t go into any more specifics, because I have to keep private things private.  (And haven’t I already done enough damage for one day?!)  I have often said that my work as a search angel has felt “protected” in a way – at least I think that because all of my searching has led to happy reunions except for one birth mother who I can’t find (though I still look every once in a while).  It makes me think that we (myself and the person on whose behalf I search) are being spared something that might hurt too much.  Maybe that’s crap I simply find more appealing than knowing that some people will just never be found.  I’d hate to think that that missing birth parent is wondering but never tried (as I have been told by nearly every found birth parent).  I can’t resist trying for a happy ending.

In preparation for this re-write, I also went through my entire photo collection with gusto in the last few months, and have attempted to attach at least one photo to each family member, and more if they are especially precious pictures, and these are now also included in the web report (although each person with photos also generates a separate Media Page). I wish Reunion didn’t make 3 separate pages for each of these different sections of info, but it can’t be helped. Luckily, the actual site building is automated, so I only had to re-link certain pages that I altered to make the Reunion page fit into my over all site layout.

In the midst of doing all this, school started back up, I’ve taken on a few new jobs (babysitting, hemming several pairs of curtains, and computer consulting), and my poor kitty Robin died. So blogging suffered a bit, but you’ll see the site overhaul is worth it! I also made a screen shot of my MemoryMiner website and included it as a link to the family history MemoryMiner site, and I’m planning to do it for my “Getting to Know Me” page with my 370 photo. In other news, I became an Amazon Affiliate, so that if anyone buys a book I talk about on my site after clicking to Amazon from my page, I will get 4% of the cut. Can’t hurt, right? I am always reading and telling people about the books, so why not? Here’s the Family History section of the site – I’m still reviewing all of my del.icio.us links to see what needs to be included on the website, but the big heavy work is done.

I learned about yet another site The Remembering Site for recording personal memories, a pay but not-for-profit site with a lifetime fee of $25 for help with and storage of your story and 100 photographs to help you tell it, make it private or public and publish it for an additional (though very reasonable cost) as you wish. I guess I will put that on my wishlist for Christmas. I don’t know how many of these kinds of sites there are yet, and I suspect the number is growing, but I liked the way this one was presented.

I think for my next post it would be good to begin to discuss what I use technology wise and why. I feel so badly for friends and acquaintances who invest in equipment only to find they have no idea how to use it, or that they can’t get it to work with their computer, etc. Not everyone has a husband like mine, comparing computers, peripherals, cameras, software, etc. to give the best buying advice, and while my experience won’t apply to everyone, it might help a few people.

Frank and I both talked about so many things, but ended up both wishing that we could tell Dad’s story to the world – it is so tragic, but captures so much in a single life.

After he left, I called my Aunt Gwen, to talk about some of these things, and she told me something amazing! Her husband, Alan has been hired to be a consultant to two screenwriters for a James Brown movie. And while talking, they happened on the subject of talented people who never made it, and one of the guys (from London) mentions that he used to come to Bleeker Street in the Village, to see a phenomenal guitarist, a light skinned black guy – of course my dad! It’s so amazing to me how people just found him and remember him vividly. (My boss passed me the phone while talking to his co-worker in our Montvale office – he also knew Dad – they played the same clubs when Black Forest Rhodes was together. My girlfriend Nicole met some guys out in Colorado a few years ago and had the same thing happen. My best friend Michele’s brother was at the show where Dad played with Jaco Pastorius following Jimmy Page, and I was able to give him a recording!) Alan is supposed to call me and I intend to ask his advice in getting Dad’s story out somehow – maybe now with professional help! I get chills thinking about the way this all has unfolded.

Following all of this activity I made a lot of updates to my Dad’s page. I added some pictures, interspersed the images and text to flow chronologically instead of having all the pictures at the top, then the articles and writings. I really wanted to include the memoirs written by Dad’s friend, but they talk so intimately and frankly about drug use, and other private past life stuff, that I had to ask his guidance on that, and I think he’s going to write me a “nameless” version. Then I contacted two of his biggest old haunts – Kenny’s Castaways and The Red Lion and already had a positive response from Marie, the daughter of the late Pat Kenny. Dad’s picture is still above the bar, she is going to post a flyer for me, and a link to my site from hers. Sweet!

Today I finally got a chance to talk to an old friend of my father. He and I have been exchanging emails, but the talking we need to have needed at least a phone call, and now we have scheduled a visit here for this Thursday. He already has told me so many things about my dad that I never knew. About Grandpa and Daddy – and I never suspected things were so bad between them. I have long imagined that my Grandfather’s abandonment with Daddy was a major source of his pain whether it was conscious or not. Now I know that there was a great deal of verbal if not physical abuse. Frank has made good efforts to connect with his people, and I can appreciate the value he places on his friendships. It’s very sweet for me to be meeting him.

I was thrilled to learn last night about a new website which John Fox shared on his blog at Memory Miner, telling us about a podcast where he was interviewed by Susan Kitchens who keeps a Blog called Family Oral History Using Digital Tools. Who even knew there was such a thing? I really love Family Oral History, but also have really enjoyed branching out into family photo history, social history, and genealogy research among other things, and along the way I have been fortunate enough to have a great computer, afford high speed internet, and great technological tools, and I have a lot of things to share with other people who enjoy these. Susan seems to have a great interest – and she really covers a broad spectrum of things like what kind of media to use, best standards for data storage, legal issues, a first person narrative library resource(!). So I decided to contribute to this area in my own way, and will try to keep this area free of my many other pursuits and distractions!

Just today I was able to complete a project I have been building towards since I first learned about MemoryMiner. You can see it here. Briefly, it is software that enables a user to add data to their digital files, linking it to people, places and times, and then export that collection to the internet. I had gotten hung up with a problem that somehow got fixed today, and I was able to send my collection of 370 photos, which represent all of the important memories and people that I have photos of. It is sad when I think about the few people who are missing – no less important to me, but for some reason or another just people I don’t have pictures of. I tried to write notes for each photo to tell something about the person or the moment, although I will probably always find things to update, fix or add. I’m kind of glad that I have no photos of one of my ex boyfriends, because I wouldn’t have wanted to purposely censor him out, but at the same time didn’t really want to actually display a picture of him in my collection. I’d sooner just skip that episode in my memory. Back to the project, though – it’s so nice for me to be able to re-visit these memories in this way – and I hope my friends will feel the same, although if they don’t you’ll read about it here!

While I was waiting for the bug to get worked out of this software, I was able to move forward on another long standing project. I have had a box of tapes of my father, some really great quality and labeled with setlists, some really crappy, with no setlists, but many never heard in any case. I had been contacted by 3 old friends of my dad within one week – it usually happens like that – a new person learns of the site and tells his circle quickly so they come in waves. I got new tapes and new photos, and while reviewing my folder containing my dad’s paper & photo trail, I came across the articles written about him for the Daily News and the Village Voice, then located the 1972 Dickinson College review. I decided to put them all on his page, I contacted the authors, and in one week had great exchanges with several different people. I made a big update to Dad’s page, made a request for help with transferring the tapes to audio files, and then catalogued the entire collection of tapes in my possession so that I could manage those tapes carefully. It was a lot of work, and I had a lot of guilt for not listening to or sharing the music for so long. It’s been almost 10 years since Dad died, so it was a good time to do this. I have projects like this on a regular basis, so I plan to share news of this work here as I go.

On Monday Trip took the day off and we had a nice time at home – but I was working – I contacted two authors of articles on my Dad – one from the Daily News and one from the Village Voice – in order to get their permission to use their work on my site. they were both very sweet – and I have transcribed them both and did a nice revision of my dad’s site with lots of new pictures.

The impetus for all this activity on his page was a surge of emails from some old friends of his – it got the wheels turning again. More photos will come – more recordings will come – but i felt the need to fill in some more of the blanks and make the page a little nicer. Everyone has been wonderfully supportive.