Years, distance, and over-extended lifestyles too often separate us from those we care about these days. So when a chance to bond again with long-absent family and friends at a reunion comes around, most of us will do everything we can to be there. This summer people everywhere will be getting together to celebrate some common cause and to enjoy each other's company. Some of us especially love a reunion because it's that rare chance to catch up with news, to tell and hear stories from the past, to recall and honor the memories of people who have touched and changed our lives. It's a time to remember life as it used to be.

With two reunions coming up this summer, I plan to use technology to remind family and friends of people and events that have helped shape our lives. If things go right, a powerful presentation of meaningful old photographs and documents will move people enough to feel compelled to go home and preserve and share their own precious heritage. Recent experiences suggest that a personalized CD or DVD slide show is a terrific way to get people interested in personal and family history.

For our daughter Diana's birthday this year, we had a small family reunion. My son-in-law, grandson, and I joined resources to put together a slide show of photographs showing five phases of her life. With background music chosen to fit each time period, dozens of photos of her from babyhood to motherhood had the desired effect of making everyone laugh and even cry a little. The youngest children giggled uncontrollably at a photo of Diana and her husband kissing on their wedding day, and the rest of us found better reason to laugh at the hairstyles and strange clothes that have thankfully gone out of fashion.

Now, somehow I've found myself appointed master of ceremonies for my high school reunion, and I've been thinking that a slide show seems like the perfect way to get everyone involved. Scanned photos of black and white snapshots (have I given my age away yet?), digital images from our high school yearbook, and some vintage tunes in the background should do it for an icebreaker. And what's a reunion without a chance to convert friends to the joys of family history? I've found some classmates' parents in the 1930 census, and that will be my subtle way to catch their interest!

The slide show I'm planning for our family reunion later this summer will include an array of photos from 1880 tintypes to the brilliant color photos of the youngest additions to the pedigree chart. There will also be likenesses of my parents and siblings that the youngest generation never had a chance to know.

As an attempt to better explain who the older people were and what they stood for, I'm going to add photographs of some of the more meaningful mementos that have been handed down through the generations. Among them: an American flag my grandmother embroidered in 1895, a letter my uncle wrote from a battlefield in France during World War I, my great-grandfather's police badge, and a shadow box containing, among other things, a small snapshot of myself with my brothers and sister (apparently taken at the orphanage where my siblings were left for a few years just before I was sent to live with an aunt), a scrap of lace from the wedding dress that the aunt who raised me wore eighty years ago, and mementos given to me by my four siblings who died too young.

Reunions are great motivators. Preparing for one of these events makes us finally get around to identifying people in photos, citing documents, and identifying artifacts so that present and future generations will understand their meaning, their inspirational value, and the importance of saving it all.

Return to September/October 2004 issue of Ancestry Magazine.