My Mom's Side of the Family:
I've spent a major amount of time over the last month or two trying to get all our family videos backed up & organized. (This all started as a way to get everything organized as I've been doing the fun & lengthy project of making family video compilations, which I'm still actively working on now that I've finally gotten them all organized). But another reason I wanted to get everything organized was to be able to share the videos that I have of family history interviews of my grandparents & great grandparents. I had a variety of types of files -- a few audio recordings that were recorded on casette tapes years ago by my parents with their parents/grandparents, and others that were video recordings that I had done with my grandparents & one of my great grandmas a few years ago. There's even one audio recording of Christmas morning in 1982 (my first Christmas), where you can hear my parents and my dad's parents talking on it (this happens to be the only one of these recordings that has my Grandpa John's voice on it, so that's nice to have). And there's another old audio recording of my parents doing an interview of my mom's maternal grandparents, Mamaw & Bampaw (Bob & Frances Monk) -- unfortunately the audio quality gets really poor at parts of that recording, almost to the point of not being able to make out what was being said. But I figured it was worth preserving it, even with the poor audio quality, in hopes that we might be able to listen carefully to figure out what they were saying or maybe that there is a way to improve the sound quality in the future to be able to understand it all. The video recording I did with my my Grandpa Carl was relatively short and was all one one video file, but the ones I did with each of my grandmas and Mamaw (my great grandma) were made up of multiple short video clip files. So I set out to get them all backed up and to preserve them in a way that could easily be shared with others. I decided to save them so that the interviews that consisted of several shorter video clips were all saved together as one larger file, and to make video files of all of them (even the ones that were only audio recordings). So I popped the files into iMovie and added titles. On the audio recordings I added a handful of photos to each one too. And I saved those. So now I have a file for each recording, and they've all been backed up. I decided to share them on FamilySearch.org, and of course they don't accept video files, but they accept audio files -- I converted them to audio files, then I did some youtube learning for how to adjust the output settings in iTunes in order to save these files at a small enough file size that FamilySearch would allow me to upload them to their website, and I was able to get them all saved as audio files and uploaded to that site. And I wanted to share them all here too, so I uploaded them to youtube so I could share the video links here on my blog. (Oh, and I also included the two video files I had of my Grandpa John's and Michael's Grandma Bradshaw's funeral slideshows that I made down below). Now, the next step is to go back and type up transcripts of what was said in each of these interviews -- I believe I already went back and did that with the video interview of Grandpa Carl, and I know we've started to do it with a couple of the other interviews, but that takes time -- maybe I can get my boys involved with helping type up the transcriptions.
