As I've mentioned several times over the past few months, I inherited many boxes of vintage family film slides in September. Over the past month, I have been using my film scanner to scan, edit and preserve these slides. It has been a tedious process, but it is one that is well worth the time because so many of the images haven't been seen for 50 years. I was not yet born when my family lived in Palos Verdes, California. My family previously lived in Anchorage, Alaska (my grandparents and mother) and Green Mills, Ohio (my grandparents, great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents). As I never spent time in either of those places but heard about them growing up, these images are like a time machine that has taken me back through history to meet the people I never had the opportunity to know and see the places I wasn't able to experience first-hand. It has been a truly incredible, almost out-of-body experience. After sharing this project with family, friends and neighbors, I have been surprised by how many of them have similar boxes of slides that are decaying in their closets and attics. The combination of their stories and my own have inspired me to offer film and photo scanning, editing and archiving as services of Gerald & Joan when our new website launches later this season. My own family's stories have become such an integral part of this blog that it only seems fitting that the preservation of other people's stories should be a part of Gerald & Joan as well.

Here are just a few of the people and places I've seen lately: