Interests
Our personal desires or interests sometimes have to be put on hold due to societal or personal limitations or a combination of both. I find myself in this situation, along with most other folks in this world, as we navigate our way through the COVID 19 pandemic lockdowns and as I deal with some health challenges. Traditional church services, Saturday morning breakfasts at the airport with pilot friends, rebuilding a plane with other flying club members, dance lessons and social dancing, flying in the enclosed cockpit of a small plane, dining out with friends, local and international travel have all fallen victim to the pandemic. My focus has changed to trying to stay safe so I will hopefully be alive, healthy, and ready to begin a "new normal" life as the pandemic restrictions begin to be lifted. To effectively use my pandemic time I have taken on a couple of projects, highlighted below, which are related to my general interests.
Preserving Family History
I have recently made good progress documenting my family history, a project I have been working on, but not making very good progress with for the past 30 years. Information, documents and images I have are entered into Family Tree Maker on my computer which uploads the information to Ancestry.ca. Ancestry displays the information nicely for sharing with family members and facilitates connecting with distant relatives who may have additional information about my family. This is a work in progress which can go on forever.
Preserving Family Memories
I have also undertaken a project to convert a significant collection of 8 and super 8mm movie film to digital files so they can be edited and shared with my family. I am using iMovie to edit the digitized movie files, 8 and Hi8 videotapes with the edited files being uploaded to a shared Dropbox folder to make them available to family members for viewing online or to download. I plan to add short video clips of individuals in my family tree to Family Tree Maker / Ancesty.ca. This is a time-consuming project which I expect will last well beyond the lockdown period.