I have never been really interested or thought too much about how I would want to preserve my family’s history in general. Maybe it’s because I was naive and thought I already knew everything there was to know. Or maybe it’s because I had seen so many attempts by my mom trying to create baby books for my siblings and I. Naturally my book is the most completed one being that I’m the oldest child (and her favorite). Just kidding!However, today I believe my mom would have great success with it due all of the digital ways she could use to create one.

Although like I previously mentioned, prior to this class, I didn’t really care about preserving my family’s history because I thought it consisted of scrapbooking and having it as physical album to show when people came over it visit. After learning in this class how easy and efficient it can be I am now interested in starting to digitally preserve my families history.

I actually had started thinking about family history last month when my grandmother died. She had eleven siblings, twelve including her. My grandmother was the youngest out of the twelve kids in her family. At her wake my grandfather had a bunch of pictures of the family. Pictures I had never seen before. I was even in some of them yet had never seen them before. Who would have thought that he had collected all of these pictures?

Before I begin to digitally preserve of the history of my family there are a couple questions I must ask about the information I am putting out on the web. I am a visual person and will probably will have the history shown through pictures. That is one of the best things I feel that you can digitally display on the net. Some of the pictures are older, yellow, dusty and even possibly torn slightly. That is benefit of JPG will help with some restoration of the pictures. JPG enhances photographs in similar continuous tone with images that contain many colors, then breaks down the image and disregards the kind of information that the eye is least likely to notice.

I am also comfortable with using photographs because I feel like they tell the best story. Words can sometimes change the meaning of something and a lot times people are feeling different emotion when a picture is being taken and even though I am just trying to preserve history of the family, I must remember this is history and true history is argument based. Families tend to be easiest people to have arguments with because there is a great amount of history that has been collected overtime. Sometimes bringing up the past isn’t the best thing to do. However if it’s a great picture to me… It’s going on the site! I just don’t want to put words in anyone else’s mouth. I truly may try to preserve some of photos I have of my family but it would definitely have to be after this semester!