The Digital Shoe Box

A few years ago, my father and I decided we wanted to make a book about his grandparents, William Raymond Randolph and Mary Emma Sophia Schriefer .

While not a scholarly effort to record our family lineage, it is to be a pictorial collection of their lives, family and friends. As most would do, we put the call out to our relatives for prints and negatives, and received hundreds of responses. We spent much of the Spring of 2000 scanning and documenting who was in each image; collecting around a thousand images, all coming from prints and negatives relatives had collected into photo albums or had stashed away in shoe boxes in their attics.

With the switch, for most people from film to digital cameras, it begs the question, "What will the digital shoebox in the future look like?", "How will the 'family historians' of tomorrow, 'find' the digital images of today, if there is no physical shoe box in the attic?"

While I have no real answer (sorry), I do have a mechanism that can fill a gap, that is, the creation of digital books of images, each year for family events, travel/vacation experiences, etc. While is does not answer or provide a solution for long term access to a digital image, it does provide a physical marker in time of an event, that could wind up in your attic to be found by one of your future relatives.

I've been using Blurb to create my books. They provide a nice client application that you can freely download and (while a little buggy) provides a large selection of book sizes, layout styles and templates.



Hopefully, some of these will find there way into someone's attic, to be found by a future family historian.