Tonight, my cousin Hope and her husband came over for dinner, and to start putting together the "slide show" for the family reunion.  Hope agreed at the last reunion (seven years ago now) to be the family archivist.  At past reunions (there have been two of them), there was a "memorabilia room", in which photos were mounted to walls, and folks could come visit them.  I suggested to her that we consider doing it electronically this time, so that it could be a continuous slide show on a computer, perhaps projected onto a wall or screen.

We still have details to work out, but she brought over the photos, and we've managed to import the son of friends of ours (from Halifax) for a couple of weeks, so he's taken on the scanning and building the slide show.  His summer has been so boring that he saw this as more interesting than being at home. 

It's wonderful to watch how this confluence of people and needs have worked out.  Hope was visibly lightened by leaving the photos here, knowing that they'd be converted into electronic format.  She'll come back later this week or early next week, and see if she'd like to try changing the order in which they've been scanned in, and to help us put names to faces and the name of who owns what photos, so that people know who to ask if they'd like a copy of the photo.  Edwin is carefully experimenting with contrast and borders on each one, to show them off at their best.   And when they're all done their work, I get the slideshow to add to the family website.

What I'm finding most magical about it is that the new technology is helping to bring these old photos to life.  Hope has been reviewing the photos with an eye on the family tree, so it might be possible, when the family tree is translated into a web-friendly format, to have links from the family tree entries to the existing photos.    And then we can look at these folks and see them as they were -- recent immigrants in the first generation, first-generation Canadians in the second generation, and far-flung expatriates in the third and fourth generations.   The cycles become clearer when the images can be manipulated without dealing with the bulk and confusion of the hard copies of photos.

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Comps update:  We spent the weekend travelling to and from Massachusetts (and a day or two in Massachusetts), and I was listening to lectures in political science (actually political philosophy) and economics (actually political economy).  It was reassuring to hear the original words of the profs, and to realize that the same questions I asked in class then are the ones I'd ask now, if I hadn't got answers then.  I've still not started doing the dreaded calculus, but it can't wait much longer.  Oh well.

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Gashi's update:  I was read the riot act by Immigration Canada for having even opened their health files.  Now, I'm not sure how I was supposed to find the immunization records we needed to register the kids for school without opening the files, but there you have it.  And, I was told, Hep B isn't a "notifable" disease, although the files have bright yellow notification stickers all over them.  It raises interesting dilemmas that I was instinctively aware of when I was feeling like I was betraying the family's privacy while telling others what seemed like information they needed to have.  Tomorrow is the doctor's appointment, so we'll have a better view of their health risks after that.

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