The story of your life is made of beautiful moments lived, successes, failures, opportunities, and setbacks. It is far more than the simple dates genealogists focus on. It is about emotions.

Therefore transmitting your story is transmitting the emotions you lived through.

How can you achieve that?

Preserve the material

In most families, an essential part of the memory of those unique moments that shaped your family is scattered among faded photos, Super 8 videos, or cut out newspaper articles. But paper deteriorates over time, video tapes will soon become unreadable due to lack of reading material, and all of them can disappear instantly in a fire or a flooding. So the first step is of course to digitize what needs to be preserved. Once your older souvenirs will have rejoined your more recent digital pictures, you will be safe from several hazards.

But do you feel safe now with souvenirs stored on a hard drive? Think twice. A study by Backblaze, a major cloud provider, found that on average hard drives last less than 7 years. So unless you want to implement a professional backup strategy, involving periodic copies of your hard drives and storing in different places, you need a professional partner to take care of that. Someone like a cloud provider who would respect your privacy and not take advantage of the intimate material you provide to reap more data about you. You need a trustful and reliable partner in storage who will guarantee that your memories will remain stored for at least a hundred years without incident.

Select relevant material

Now that you have ensured preservation of your most meaningful pictures, videos and documents, can you feel comfortable that your heirs and descendants have the right material to remember you? Well, not yet. It may happen that the volume of these souvenirs is more that individuals can handle. What about bequeathing to your descendants 60 hours of videos and 10,000 pictures? Will they find the needles in the haystack? Probably not.

Therefore you have to help them by selecting the most meaningful elements. Which pictures bring emotions to you? Which video best show the world you lived in? Select only these elements.

To transmit your story efficiently to your descendants, you have to filter the wheat from the chaff. And only you can do it, because you are the only person to know the value of each element which form your story.

Explain your material

But the only link between these elements you consider so meaningful is your memory. You may be the only remaining person able to identify missing family members, or to determine on what occasion a picture was taken.

That is why when a generation disappears, too often does the next generation throw away the photos of these people who have become impossible to identify in the photos, or these old video tapes that are so difficult to read. Anyway they no longer understand their context. Thus disappears the memory of families.

So you are the glue between these elements you have chosen, and you have to explain why you selected them. Why did you choose this picture of vacation and not another? And who are these persons on the pictures with you? What do they mean to you?

This is the moment to reveal your emotions. How you feel when you watch these pictures. Why are you so proud of this diploma and not another? Emotions are best transmitted using videos, so consider filming you while explaining your material.

Open up yourself, don’t be shy, it’s for people who love you, no need for professional grade equipment, and a makeup artist. The most important is to be genuine.

But do it well, because your testimony is here to last. Once your video is shot, store it with the rest of the material.

Ensure easy access to your life story for generations to come

Once you have gathered the right material, you still have two hurdles to overcome: providing access to the persons you choose and technical standards.

Providing access

Now that you have created your testimony, how can you ensure it will remain available for the people you have designated, and for generations to come? Obviously you can give a copy to every person, but are you sure they will not loose it? Are you sure that 50 years later, when their time will come to pass it to their own heirs they will have preserved it dutifully? Europeans move 4 times in their life on average. And North Americans move much more. Can you be sure that your testimony will not be lost during a move?

You need a trustful partner to keep the material, and grant access to the persons you have designated. And later, they will delegate their rights to their own heirs, thus building a family tree with you as a root.

Technical standards

Remember the VHS, Betamax, DivX, Video CD? These are just a few examples of format which have gone to oblivion. If you have material in one of these formats, you will have a hard time using it. Technical formats live and die as humans do. So what will happen to your testimony when the technical format you have used is disregarded by the industry? It will become unreadable.

That is why you need a trustful partner, in the future, to make sure it remains readable for generations to come, by making the necessary conversions. Imagine you had a video of your grandfather on a VHS tape. To read it today, you would need to transform it to mp4 format, which is the most common video format nowadays. This is the service that your testimony will need in the future to ensure easy reading by your descendants. Can you find someone to provide this service when the time will come?

Preserve Family stories helps you record your family history today from those records that still exist. Then once this memory has been recorded, we preserve it to pass it on to your descendants. We are a trustful partner, and only grant access to the persons you have designated, then to their designated heirs.

Don't worry anymore about losing the memories that are your family's story. We keep them safe for future generations.

The stories that make up your family will live on for generations to come.

Not sure where to start? Don't worry. We have your back at PreserveFamilyStories. Leave your email address and we will send you our free document to get a simple, pragmatic step by step methodology to create the story of your life, using video and meaningful material.