The Costco Connection - December 2016

BY TIM TALEVICH

LIKE MOST PARENTS, my mother and father were diligent about taking photos of all the key moments in their growing family’s life. ;ere were the holiday snapshots: packages around the Christmas tree, Easter egg hunts in the yard, Halloween outfits and more. There were the big events, such as birthdays and weddings. ;ere were vacations, which in our case mostly meant kids in the surf, chasing each other in the sand or watching the sun dip into the ocean at sunset.

;ese pictures made their way into photo
albums—about 25 over the years—which
were always on the shelf to browse through
during later family reunions. As the folks
retired, downsized and moved around, the
books were relegated to large plastic storage
bins, along with all the other papers and doc-
uments that come with life, from birth certi;-
cates to diplomas and all years in between. And
these dozen or so storage bins moved from
sibling to sibling, until they ended up at their
;nal stop: my garage.

Now, the question is what to do with decades of photos, documents and memories—a family collection that’s too big to keep, yet too precious to toss. It’s a crossroads that many of us come to between the past and the future, paper and digital. I undertook a yearlong project to digitize, organize, share and, yes, ultimately discard the contents of those dozen storage bins.

First step: organizing

My ;rst step was to take a broad sweep through all the bins. I quickly put the photo albums into one area and all other documents in another. ;ough it was hard, I adopted this mantra: Toss it if it’s not absolutely precious. So out went Christmas cards from friends, poor-quality snapshots and other things that were important to my folks but not to me or my siblings.

Next, I set up ;le folders for each member of my family ( 10 kids in all). As I came across a photo or document that would be of interest to one of them, into his or her folder it went.