Randy Seaver has posed a 21st century challenge for us on this week’s Genea-Musings Saturday Night Genealogy Fun.

So many of us have home movies, videocassettes and, in the case of my family, slides of family fun. What have we done to preserve them? If nothing, do we have a plan in place? If not, the ability to watch home movies and view other obsolete media like slides is quickly passing us by.

Neither my family nor Dave’s apparently ever took any home movies, like the old 8 mm reels, so converting those reels to a more modern technology isn’t anything I’ve ever had to deal with.

However, we had a few videocassettes of family outings. Also, Dave was a huge fan of developing his photos into slides, so we have/had lots of those.

The impetus for us getting the project done was a trip we took to Europe about five years ago. One of our stops was Madrid and we met up with the young lady who was our exchange student in the early 1980s. She lived with us for ten months and was like a daughter to us.

We went through all the slides that Dave had taken when she was here. There were quite a few since we took her to as many places as we could – San Francisco, central California, Las Vegas, San Diego and we even got to Hawaii over spring break.

The solution was simple, as there is a small business near us here in Tucson that converts old media at a reasonable price. We were given both a CD and a flash drive of the conversions so they could also be saved on a computer and in the cloud.

Dave has been a bit lax about finishing the project as he still has a few hundred slides. I’ve reminded him a few times, but I think this would be a good summer project. 🙂

Thanks, Randy, for this week’s topic.