Pixorium Success Story: 2 Languages + 1 Journey = Family Treasure
By Pixorium Client, Paula A. Rosenberg
Six years ago, I started on a journey with Pixorium to digitally preserve my family’s pictures. In a fit of downsizing, my parents had handed me 72 photo albums filled with family history. I was the family historian for my generation. So even though it filled the entire back seat of my car on the ride back from Texas, I was excited.
I desperately wanted to back up the really old family pictures to share with family and add to my ongoing genealogy work. Plus, I honestly had to reduce the sheer volume of albums so I wouldn’t need a wall of bookshelves to hold them all!
The project became urgent when I realized that so many of my own childhood pictures were stored in the “magnetic” albums so popular in the 70’s and 80’s. Many of them were looking pretty beaten up and getting darker. They needed to come out.
Since I couldn’t afford to have them scanned all at once, Pixorium helped me prioritize the mountain of photo albums. It became a great “busy hands” project to do while watching TV, moving the pictures from the albums into archival photo boxes. Then I’d go through them again and pick the ones I wanted to preserve: pictures of people, pictures of big events, pictures that captured where we lived and what it looked like. (You really don’t need to preserve pictures of familiar mountains that haven’t changed in eons!)
You have digitized pictures…now what?
It’s a lot of fun to digitize pictures. Tiny little pictures of your father’s fourth birthday party with a lot of little faces suddenly turns into a hilarious shot of what birthday decorations looked like in 1940 when placed upon the heads of your relatives.
A little old lady holding a baby turns into your great-grandmother, who you’ve never seen, holding your mom!
Mom as a baby
But other than sharing a laugh with friends on social media, what could I do with it all?
Then, Fate handed me an opportunity in the face of a sad event: my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. A rotten thing to befall a lovely woman. But the positive about this disease is how vivid long-term memories start to become.
Mom started to tell us stories about her childhood we’d never heard. She probably hadn’t even remembered them until her misfiring brain uncovered them. I bought her a digital recorder and instructed my dad to turn it on whenever she started talking about her childhood or family or whatever memories came out.
Then, I attended one of Pixorium’s photobook workshops and saw another client’s book, a family history book created from digitized photos and family stories. The idea was born to gather Mom’s stories into a book and marry them with the family photos I’d had digitized.
Paula and her mom in Switzerland
Paula and her mom in Switzerland
The Process
I wish I could say that I worked on this non-stop and finished the project in a couple of weeks. But like many big projects, I got overwhelmed. And it took many times of revisiting the project to get it done.
Over several years. It’s a little embarrassing, but I guess that is how life can be sometimes.
First step was transcribing Mom’s tapes. Trying to find the balance between capturing how Mom talked and having it be understandable when you read it.
Second was figuring out how to translate it into French. My Mom emigrated from Switzerland and I still have family who live there and only speak French. Thankfully, I have a cousin in Switzerland who teaches English. Between my cousin and Google Translate, I got it all translated. (Sometimes we had to have long talks with Mom about how to translate English sayings into French.)
Then the hunt for a book company that could handle French characters. Fate again stepped in with Shutterfly deciding to offer foreign characters. (For some inexplicable reason, they decided to drop some of the most common French characters partway through this project, but close enough that my family could still understand it.)
Many times, I came crying to Jiffy, convinced I didn’t know what I was doing and THIS IS THE WORST BOOK EVER! But she helped me get focused and refine my ideas. Since the book was in two languages, we decided that English would be in one color and French would be in another.
When I finally got the proof copy into my hands, I tried desperately to find all the mistakes. There were so many the book was practically bleeding with marks and corrections and little flags that Jiffy had placed during yet another “I don’t know what I’m doing” editing session.
Oh so many corrections!
By this time, Mom could no longer read, thanks to the Alzheimer’s. But she was thrilled to have me read her the book in both English and French and give me corrections.
Getting to hand the finished product to Mom was very exciting. Mom was always a bookworm. For her, to be able to hold her own book was an experience she never thought she’d have. She just rubbed her hands over the pages and smiled.
My family has also had a wonderful time with the book. They’re loving the stories and the old pictures of family long gone. And I even discovered who will be our family historian in the next generation, since my 12-year-old second cousin has become obsessed with the book.
Finished!
My advice to anyone else thinking about how nice it would be to have your family’s photos and stories collected into a book is this: it’s a big project, but SO worth tackling. Just like taking a long journey, if you have to stop for a while, that’s okay. But start again after the rest and just keep on going – you’ll soon have a family treasure of your very own!
Editor’s note: Paula’s experience is real—time, fate and persistence all play a role for everyone undertaking such a journey. Her perspective and joy is also real. Enjoy…and get inspired!