Hello Qualicum Beach! Hello Parksville! Hello Comox! Hello Campbell River! Hello Nanaimo and Victoria! It's so exciting when I get to come visit. When I am in your neighbourhood I am there to do life story family history video interviews and old photo digitizing sessions. What that means is from the moment I walk through your front door until the time I leave we're going to be working on your family history film or book. The goal is to get it done so you can immediately begin educating and inspiring the next generation of your family.
The phase of gathering the interviews, figuring out the stories about your ancestors, looking through your genealogy, and trying to piece together the interesting and unique story of your family and your ancestors ... is so much fun. Every family and person has a story! To get ready, what I recommend you do is use our Life Story Questionnaire to scribble down what you know about the main characters of your book or film. You might have dozens or even hundreds of ancestors mapped out on your family tree but there's no way to adequately represent all of them in your family history keepsake so pick 5 to 10 ancestors who have interesting stories or who lived in interesting times. You can always add more later.
The next thing that we're going to spend some time on while I'm with you is digitizing the imagery that's going to be on the pages of your book or layered into your film. It might be that you've got photo albums that have been carefully created by you or your parents or grandparents. Those we can digitize and even use some of the labels or annotations that have been lovingly applied naming the names of people and the places and the events. You might have a stack of old paper print photographs that are still in the original pouches from when they were developed. We can rapidly digitize those so that they can be also used. And you may even have enlarged photos that are framed and hung on the walls that we’ll digitize to be included in your film or book. No matter what kind of imagery you have we will be focussed on digitizing all of that and getting it into one virtual location so it's easy to work with when we're designing in your book or editing your film.
It's tempting to wait until you are “more organized”, until you’ve found every single last photo or genealogical fact. But here's some advice: don't wait. The reason is that there is a countless number of family history books and films that people intended to make but never got around to because they were still searching out details and photos. Those books and films never got made. Instead it's better to create something even if it's slightly incomplete and get it handed over to the next generation so they can start to be inspired by it, they can start to read the storybook to their kids at bedtime, they can be wowed by your family history film on their phones and tablets and computers right away.
My schedule fills up pretty quickly so if you'd like to arrange a life story video interview session or a photo digitization session or both just click Contact on my website and reach out so we can schedule your session.
August 17
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