- Skills and Gear Check
- Project: Store Your Family Photos Online
- Project: Make Digital Reproductions of Your Existing Paper Photo Albums
- Project: Restore Heirloom Photos
- Project: Create an Animated, Music-Enhanced Digital Album
- Project: Crank the Digital Album-Making Creativity Dial to Full Blast
- Using FlipAlbum to Preserve and Share Family History
- Project: Create Paperback or Hardbound Albums
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Using FlipAlbum to Preserve and Share Family History
Are you a genealogy nut? If yes, read on as my personal project story may inspire you to use FlipAlbum or another album-making software package to save and share your precious family history. Recognizing that programs such as FlipAlbum 6 can be powerful family history tools, here’s what I did to transform my father’s WWII photo album into a digital heirloom.
Ever see the 1990 movie about the crew of the Memphis Belle bomber? The film dramatically portrayed the harrowing experiences of a B-17 bomber crew flying missions over Germany. My father lived that story as he served as a top turret gunner and master mechanic on his Flying Fortress.
When not rattling off rounds from his double barrel machine gun in pitched battles in the sky, he’d pull out a small camera and capture shots of combat, life on the plane, and his R and R trips throughout Europe (see Figure 3.17).
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Figure 3.17 My father’s WWII album is full of tiny photos measuring a mere 2.5 by 3.5 inches.
Like so many war heroes, my father never talked much about his experiences before he died in 1966. When my mom passed in 1981, I inherited his now frail and aging little album. Because it’s such an important piece of family history, I wanted to create a special, enhanced digital version my sister Carol and my dad’s sister Virginia could hold, cherish, and pass down to future generations.
Enter FlipAlbum 6 and a variation on the idea of having a musical MP3 audio file background. Instead of using music, I recorded my Aunt Virginia’s voiced recollections of Dad’s war stories and used them as a running audio narration. (See Chapter 7, "Turn Your PC into a Recording Studio," on how to record audio using your PC.) To complement my aunt’s voiceover, I added informative text captions to each image in the album. The result was very rewarding, as shown in Figure 3.18.
This is a perfect example of how the power of your PC can preserve the kinds of memories many families have collected through the years. I can tell you the reaction of my sister and aunt was worth all the hours of work it took to put this together!
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Figure 3.18 Using FlipAlbum 6, I created an annotated 3D album narrated by my Aunt Virginia.