Tag Archives: family

Home Movies: The Medium of Memories

Media is a word that is used a lot, especially in my past industry of advertising, but we may not stop to think about the origin of the word itself. Media is the plural of medium, and in our particular context, medium is defined as “the intervening substance through which impressions are conveyed to the senses.”

When defined this way, media are powerful stuff. Let me give you a personal example.

At a recent family gathering a few cousins were talking about old 8 mm home movies. Some of you know what I’m talking about. You might even have some yourself, stuck somewhere in your attic or basement. They came in yellow-orange boxes from Kodak and might have “Kodachrome II” on the front. In my case, I had some which I salvaged from my mom during her transfer to her care facility. Two of my cousins similarly took custody of their films from their respective mothers. I packed what I could of these in my suitcase and gingerly transported them home, after trying to explain what they were to a curious TSA official and why they couldn’t go through an X-Ray scanner.

When I got them home, I transferred them to digital. Then, starting December 1st, I have been sharing small snippets of the resulting videos with the rest of my family, one a day in a type of home movie Advent Calendar.

Most of these home movies were shot between the mid 1950’s and mid 1960’s; capturing picnics, weekends at the family cottage north of Toronto, weddings, birthdays, going away parties, Christmases and other assorted occasions. I’ll soon tell you what this sharing of one particular medium has meant to my family and I, but first I want to give you a little background on 8 mm home movies, because I think it helps to understand why they were such an important medium.

The 8 mm format was introduced by Kodak in 1932. It was actually a 16mm format that had to be flipped and run through the camera twice. In processing, the film would be split and spliced together to create a 50 ft reel, capturing about 3 to 4 minutes.

Kodak hoped to extend the ability to make movies to the home market, but between the Great Depression and World War II, the format didn’t gain real traction until the post-war consumerism boom. Then, thanks to smaller cameras that were easier to use and improved picture quality, 8 mm movie cameras became more common place and started showing up at family gatherings, weddings, honeymoons, vacations and other notable events.

It would have been in the mid 1950’s that my mother’s family bought their first cameras. My grandfather and grandmother, a few great uncles and my mom and dad all became amateur movie makers. Suddenly, many family events became multi-camera shoots.

It was the results of this movie making boom in my family that I recently started digging through, rounding up those little yellow boxes, delicately threading the fragile film into a digital scanning system and letting grainy and poorly lit moving pictures transport me back to a time I had only heard stories about before.

Let me tell you what that meant to my family and myself. I never met my maternal grandfather (or my paternal one either, but that’s another story for another time). He passed away two weeks after I was born. I also never knew my father. He tragically died when I was just one year old. These were two man I desperately wanted to know, but never had the chance. I only knew them through still photos and stories passed on from older family members.

But suddenly, there they were; moving, laughing and living. My grandfather teasing my grandmother mercilessly and then sitting back in his easy chair with a big smile on his face as he watched his family around him. My father at his and my mom’s wedding, holding a huge cigar in one hand while he picked confetti out of his hair with the other. “My God!,” I thought, “he stands just like me!”

This medium, long forgotten as it sat in dusty boxes, brought my grandfather and father back to life for me. It colored in the outline sketches I had of who they were. For my family, these movies reconnected us to our younger selves, brought loved ones back, introduced the younger members to their direct ancestors and – for myself and others – shed new light on figures in our past that had been shrouded in the shadows of time.

Because of this project, two things became clear to me. First of all, if you have also inherited old media filled with family memories, find the time to transfer them into a medium that allows them to be shared and preserved for the future in some type of transferable format. The act of archiving brings up images of bespectacled staff peering over dusty tomes and pulling forgotten boxes from the top shelf. But it is simply the act of imbuing the past with a type of permanence so it always remains accessible.

Secondly, recognize the importance of any type of medium that captures the moments of our lives. Rick Prelinger, an archivist in California, has compiled a collection of over 30,000 home movies. He published a list of 22 reasons why home movies are important. For me, number 21 resonated most deeply: “showing and reusing (these movies) today invests audiences with the feeling that their own lives are also worth recording.”

I’m sure my dad or granddad had no idea of their own impending mortality when they were captured on these movies. They weren’t planning on being memorialized. They didn’t realize the importance of the moment – or the medium.

But today, these movies are one of the all-too-rare things we have to remember who they were. For me, it was this medium that erased the time and distance between my senses, here at the end of 2025, and that day in June, 1957 – the day my parents got married.

Thank Heavens someone was there with a camera.

Keep Those Cousins Close!

Demographic trends tend to play out on the timelines of multiple generations. Declining birth rates, increased life spans and widespread lifestyle changes can all have a dramatic impact on not only what our families look like, but also how we connect with them. And because families are the nucleus of our world, changes in families mean fundamental changes in us: who we are, what we believe and how we connect with our world.

I have previously written about one such trend – a surplus of grandparents. The ratio of grandparents to grandchildren has never been higher than it is right now, thanks to increased life expectancy and a declining birth rate. It’s closing in on 1:1, meaning for every child, there is one unique grandparent. As a grandparent, I have to believe this is a good thing.

But another demographic trend is playing out and this may not be as positive for our family structure. While the grandparent market is booming, our supply of cousins is dwindling. And – as I’ll explain shortly – cousins are a good thing for us to have.

But first, a little demographic math. In the U.S. in 1960, the average number of children per household was 3.62. This was a spike thanks to the post WWII Baby Boom, but it’s relevant because this generation and the one before were the ones that determined the current crop of cousins for people of my age.

My parents were born in the 1930s. If both of them had 3 siblings, as was the norm, that would give me 6 aunts or uncles, all having children during the Baby Boom. And each of them would have 3 to 4 kids. So that would potentially supply 24 first cousins for me.

Now, let’s skip ahead a generation. Since 1970, the average number of children per household in the U.S. has hovered between 1.5 and 2. If I had been born in 1995, that would mean I only had 2 aunts or uncles, one from my mother’s side and one from my father’s. And if they each had 2 children, that would drop my first cousin quota down to 4. That’s 20 less first cousins in just one generation!

But what does this lack of first cousins mean in real terms? Cousins play an interesting sociological and psychological role in our development. Thanks to evolution, we all have something called “kinship altruism.”  In the simplest of terms, we are hardwired to help those with which we share some DNA. Those evolved bonds are strongest with those with whom we share the most DNA. There is a hierarchy of kinship – topped by our parents and siblings.

But just one rung down the ladder are our first cousins. And those first cousins can play a critical role in how we get along with the world as we grow up. As journalist Faith Hill said, writing about this in The Atlantic, “Cousin connections can be lovely because they exist in that strange gray area between closeness and distance—because they don’t follow a strict playbook.”

As Hill said, cousins represent a unique middle ground. We have a lot in common with our cousins, but not too much. Our cousins can come from different upbringings, can span a wider range of ages than our siblings, can come from different socio-economic circumstances, can even live in different places. We may see them every day, or once every year or two. Yet, we are connected in an important way. Cousins play a critical role in helping us navigate relationships and learn to understand different perspectives. Having a lot of cousins is like having a big sandbox for our societal development.

If you overlay societal trends on this demographic trend towards fewer first cousins, the shift is even more noticeable. We are a lot more mobile now then our parents and grandparents were. Families used to generally live close to each other. Now they spread across the country. My wife, who is Italian, has almost 50 first cousins and almost all of them live in the same town. But that is rare. Most of us have a handful of cousins who we rarely see. We don’t have the advantage of growing up together. At a time when societal connection is more important than ever, I worry that this is one more instance of us losing the skills we need to get along with each other.

From my own experience, I have found that the relationship between my cousins is vital in negotiating the stewardship of our families as it’s handed off from our parent’s generation to our own. I personally have become closer to many cousins as – one by one – our parents are taken from us.  Through our cousins – we relive cherished memories and regain that common ground of shared experience and ancestry.

Grandparenting in a Wired World

You might have missed it, but last Sunday was Grandparents Day. And the world has a lot of grandparents. In fact, according to an article in The Economist (subscription required), at no time in history has the ratio of grandparents to grandchildren been higher.

The boom in Boomer and Gen X grandparents was statistically predictable. Sine 1960, global life expectancy has jumped from 51 years to 72 years. At the same time, the number of children a woman can expect to have in her lifetime has been halved, from 5 to 2.4. Those two trendlines means that the ratio of grandparents to children under 15 has vaulted from 0.46 in 1960 to 0.8 today. According to a little research the Economist conducted, it’s estimated that there are 1.5 billion grandparents in the world.

My wife and I are two of them.

So – what does that mean to the three generations involved?

Grandparents have historically served two roles. First, they, and by they, I mean typically the grandmother, provided an extra set of hands to help with child rearing. And that makes a significant difference to the child, especially if they were born in an underdeveloped part of the world. Children in poorer nations with actively involved grandparents have a higher chance of survival. And in Sub Saharan Africa, a child living with a grandparent is more likely to go to school.

But what about in developed nations, like ours? What difference could grandparents make? That brings us to the second role of grandparents – passing on traditions and instilling a sense of history. And with the western world’s obsession with fast forwarding into the future, that could prove to be of equal significance.

Here I have to shift from looking at global samples to focussing on the people that happen to be under our roof. I can’t tell you what’s happening around the world, but I can tell you what’s happening in our house.

First of all, when it comes to interacting with a grandchild, gender specific roles are not as tightly bound in my generation as it was in previous generations.  My wife and I pretty much split the grandparenting duties down the middle. It’s a coin toss as to who changes the diaper. That would be unheard of in my parents’ generation. Grandpa seldom pulled a diaper patrol shift.

Kids learn gender roles by looking at not just their parents but also their grandparents. The fact that it’s not solely the grandmother that provides nurturing, love and sustenance is a move in the right direction.

But for me, the biggest role of being “Papa” is to try to put today’s wired world in context. It’s something we talk about with our children and their partners. Just last weekend my son-in-law referred to how they think about screen time with my 2-year-old grandson: Heads up vs Heads down.  Heads up is when we share screen time with the grandchild, cuddling on the couch while we watch something on a shared screen. We’re there to comfort if something is a little too scary, or laugh with them if something is funny. As the child gets older, we can talk about the themes and concepts that come up. Heads up screen time is sharing time – and it’s one of my favorite things about being a “Papa”.

Heads down screen time is when the child is watching something on a tablet or phone by themselves, with no one sitting next to them. As they get older, this type of screen time becomes the norm and instead of a parent or grandparent hitting the play button to keep them occupied, they start finding their own diversions.  When we talk about the potential damage too much screentime can do, I suspect a lot of that comes from “heads down” screentime. Grandparents can play a big role in promoting a healthier approach to the many screens in our lives.

As mentioned, grandparents are a child’s most accessible link to their own history. And it’s not just grandparents. Increasingly, great grandparents are also a part of childhood. This was certainly not the case when I was young. I was at least a few decades removed from knowing any of my great grandparents.

This increasingly common connection gives yet another generational perspective. And it’s a perspective that is important. Sometimes, trying to bridge the gap across four generations is just too much for a young mind to comprehend. Grandparents can act as intergenerational interpreters – a bridge between the world of our parents and that of our grandchildren.

In my case, my mother and father-in-law were immigrants from Calabria in Southern Italy. Their childhood reality was set in World War Two. Their history spans experiences that would be hard for a child today to comprehend – the constant worry of food scarcity, having to leave their own grandparents (and often parents) behind to emigrate, struggling to cope in a foreign land far away from their family and friends.  I believe that the memories of these experiences cannot be forgotten. It is important to pass them on, because history is important. One of my favorite recent movie quotes was in “The Holdovers” and came from Paul Giamatti (who also had grandparents who came from Southern Italy):

“Before you dismiss something as boring or irrelevant, remember, if you truly want to understand the present or yourself, you must begin in the past. You see, history is not simply the study of the past. It is an explanation of the present.”

Grandparents can be the ones that connect the dots between past, present and future. It’s a big job – an important job. Thank heavens there are a lot of us to do it.