Photos have always been part of my life. I remember going to my grandparents’ house as a child for Sunday dinners every week, where it was typical for my grandfather to say to my cousins and I, “Hey, kids, look here” and snap a couple of photos of us as we played board games, went sledding, or whatever. When we were older and he got a Polaroid camera, we were the ones who wanted to take photos, just to watch them develop in minutes.

My parents enjoyed taking photos and movies over the years as well. My mom always had her camera ready for school plays, holidays, and vacations. My dad would get out the video camera for trips, reunions, and summer picnics. The photos were easy to find whenever we wanted to look back at a holiday or event, but the videos were more difficult – the projector and screen had to be pulled out of storage, set up, the film fed from reel to reel, etc.; it was much more of a production. Over time, while we enjoyed watching those home movies, it was the photos that we got in the habit of looking at again and again.

Fast forward a decade or so. When my husband and I had our first child, my parents bought us a camcorder for Christmas. It was a big one that reminded us of the cameras that you see used by news station videographers (okay, not that big, but definitely something to carry on your shoulder). Still, the resulting video was on a VHS cassette that we could pop into our VHS player, and it was so easy to watch the movies right on our tv. We took movies of our kids at various milestones, at school plays and programs, at baseball and karate tournaments, at holidays, and on vacations. Over the years, the cassette tapes and video cameras became smaller and lighter, but we could still play them through the VHS player with various adapters.

Then came DVDs and Blu-ray discs for movies. We transitioned from that VHS tape player to a DVD player for watching movies that we rented or purchased, but we never updated our video camera to this new format. We stopped taking movies and continued documenting our family events with photos. I don’t even think we realized we made this change because it happened gradually and at a time when we were so busy with our kids’ activities that the thought of taking movies just faded away.

About two years ago I came across a box that held video tapes of family movies. I thought, what fun it would be if we could watch these again and see our kids when they were young (they are all in their 20’s now). So, I purchased a FOREVER Box and sent the VHS tapes to Green Bay to be digitized. A couple of months later, we gathered with our extended family at the beach for a week’s vacation. We spent several evenings watching those converted movies, reminiscing and enjoying the chance to re-live those memories together. Our kids heard stories from their grandparents that were new to them, stories they might never have heard if not for the movies that brought back those memories. Towards the end of the week, both our daughters told me – separately – that watching the old movies was one of the best parts of our vacation that year. My only regret is that I don’t have enough videos of my grandmother – who passed away before I was married – nor of my father-in-law who passed when our kids were very young. I would love to have “introduced” them to their grandfather and great-grandmother through home movies.

I love my photos – candid, posed, professional – all of them. I enjoy looking through them often. A friend introduced me to traditional scrapbooking over 20 years ago, and several years later I became a digital scrapbooker, which is even more fun. But I will never again forget about the need to also take movies – to hear our family members laughing and talking, to watch them interact with each other and see their personalities – that is something that a photo can’t capture.

Thanks to FOREVER, we can have both! We can get old movies digitized, we can upload both photos and videos from our cameras and smartphones to our Storage Accounts, and we have peace of mind knowing that these memories are safe, secure, and permanent. I am making a conscious effort to take both photos and movies these days. Now is the time to capture new family memories so that new generations will be able to “meet” us in the future.