Tributes & Video Biographies
Sharing Life Stories, Connecting Generations, Preserving Legacies

Media Archiving


  • Anatomy of an Archival Scrapbook Project

    We are in the process of wrapping up a large scrapbook project for a client that has been such a delight to work on that I wanted to share the project and the process we’ve gone through as I believe many of my readers may have similar such scrapbooks a...

    Read more  ●  Tuesday, January 19th, 2010


  • Archival Photo and Slide Scanning Services

    Flickr photo: catcetera In January of 2008, Money Magazine wrote an article comparing 6 of the most popular scanning services. They sent 40 prints to the six different companies and rated them on cost, turnaround time and scan quality. The top rated company ...

    Read more  ●  Wednesday, March 12th, 2008


  • Beyond Wills and Trusts – What Do You Do With Your Intellectual Property?

    Most people that have families take on the onerous and reflective task of writing a will which provides instructions for the distribution and disposable of our physical assets after we die. Some are very complicated and involve the establishment of trusts to ...

    Read more  ●  Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011


  • Create Your Own Family Bible

    Flickr photo: Wonderlane We often do large photo archiving projects for families that involve scanning and creating digital records of photos albums, boxes of loose photos, newspaper articles, certificates and other family mementos that a family wants preser...

    Read more  ●  Thursday, January 8th, 2009


  • Creating a Storyboard for Multimedia Projects

    Flickr photo: Sthomas01 A storyboard is an essential tool for laying out a video or film project to communicate the look of a piece, to show how a story or plot unfolds and to organize the sequence of scenes before any time or money has been spent on studio ...

    Read more  ●  Friday, September 5th, 2008


  • Every Memory of Your Life Stored Forever – MyLifeBits Project

    Gordon Bell What would it look like if you had a computer with every single memory stored on it forever? You would be able to access every webpage you’ve ever looked at, every email you’ve read, every photo you’ve taken or been in, videos o...

    Read more  ●  Friday, April 4th, 2008


  • Gift Options For Family Researchers Abound

    This week marks the beginning of the holiday gift-giving season. Perhaps you are wondering what you might give to a fellow family history researcher or genealogist, or maybe your family and friends are asking you for hints. Simple, practical gifts include a d...

    Read more  ●  Friday, November 23rd, 2007


  • Hope Chest

      A Hope Chest was originally used as a dowry. It was property that a woman owned and brought into her marriage. Some women could not find a suitable husband, for various factors; therefore, the dowry was used as a way of enticing a man into marriage. Th...

    Read more  ●  Monday, November 24th, 2008


  • How I Save and Archive My Digital Photos

    I spend a lot of time flying back and forth between Houston and Los Angeles to visit my family. The flight is 3 hours and last year I made a commitment to spend that three hour time period working on sorting, identifying and tagging all of my digital photos....

    Read more  ●  Tuesday, January 25th, 2011


  • How To Backup and Store Your Digital Photo Files

    Flickr photo: Chas.™ Last week I blogged about how I have been organizing and tagging all my digital photos during frequent 3 hour flights. I received several comments and questions from readers about what to do with those photos once they are tagged and o...

    Read more  ●  Friday, February 4th, 2011


  • How To Share Your Digital Photos With Family and Friends

    For the past two blog posts I have been writing about archiving (How I Save and Archive My Digital Photos), and storing digital photos (How To Backup and Store Your Digital Photo Files.) My first post on this subject looked at how I created an architecture t...

    Read more  ●  Tuesday, February 8th, 2011


  • Kronomy, Another New Social Media Tool

    I have been playing around with a new online application called Kronomy (this site is no longer available). I’m not really ready to show the world my creation on there but let me tell you a bit about it. There is a concept called collective consciousne...

    Read more  ●  Saturday, August 16th, 2008


  • Legacy Lists – Organizing The Family Information

    Flickr photo:neloqua I recently realized that while my two sons are grown, 25 and 22, my will lists my brother as the executor of my estate. My oldest son lives here in Houston and it has occurred to me that I need to start grooming him to be my executor, sh...

    Read more  ●  Sunday, October 19th, 2008


  • Magnetic Photo Album Deterioration

    Flickr photo: mimi.bowling We often hear clients complain they can’t remove their photos from those old inexpensive magnetic photo albums. Those are the ones with the pre-glued pages that you just stick the photos in and slide the plastic sleeve over t...

    Read more  ●  Thursday, April 17th, 2008


  • Memory and Craft

    Flickr photo: josefnovak33 I was recently watching “Craft in America“, PBS’s excellent series covering the major influences that play a part in each artist’s craft. The particularly episode I watched was episode V – Process, tha...

    Read more  ●  Tuesday, October 13th, 2009


  • My Computer Nightmare Video Contest

    My partner and good friend Isabelle MacCrimmon has just entered Mozy’s video contest. The rules are to create a video of your worst computer nightmare that cannot exceed 1 minute in length. Considering she and her husband Keith are big fans of Indiana J...

    Read more  ●  Tuesday, January 13th, 2009


  • My Top Five Photo Sharing Websites

    One of my blog readers recently wrote asking me about the best way to share photos with family members who are far away. She was interested in having family members help her identify people in her photos but was hesitant to put the photos in the mail, fearin...

    Read more  ●  Friday, January 27th, 2012


  • Natural Disasters 101

    Flickr photo:Kicks in New Orleans I am sitting here in Houston, waiting for Hurricane Ike to arrive. It’s 9AM and he’s not expected until around midnight but I’m nervous and not quite sure what to do. Arranging things around the house, most...

    Read more  ●  Friday, September 12th, 2008


  • New Year’s Resolutions Should Include a Good Backup Protocol

    Flickr photo: Shanghai Daddy I was just reading about a woman whose computer was acting up so she called a computer technician out to her home to save her from the dread ‘blue screen.’ Apparently she had 10 years worth of genealogy research store...

    Read more  ●  Monday, December 22nd, 2008


  • Packing Your Cameras For a Holiday Getaway

    Planning on a getaway this holiday season? When it’s time to pack for that vacation you’ve been counting down the days to, remember to consider bringing along these extras to make vacation photography a breeze: Bring Ziploc bags of different sizes...

    Read more  ●  Tuesday, December 11th, 2007


  • SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS

    Fully committed to sharing her knowledge, vision and talents with others in the genealogy and oral history groups, communication arts industry and technology community, Stefani Twyford is available for speaking engagements.

    If you would like to arrange for her to speak to your group, contact us.

  • CONTACT US

    • QUOTES

      "The stories that we tell ourselves function to order our world, serving both a foundation upon which each of us constructs our sense of reality and filter through which we process each event that confronts us every day. The values that we cherish and wish to preserve, the behavior that we wish to censure, the tears and dread that we can barely confess in ordinary language, the aspirations and goals that we most dearly prize--all of these things are encoded in the stories that each culture invents and preserves for the next generation, stories that, in effect, we live by and through." Henry Louis Gates 


      Literary Critic, Scholar, Writer and Teacher 

      
Chair: African American Studies at Harvard University
      “In truth a family is what you make it. It is made strong, not by number of heads counted at the dinner table, but by the rituals you help family members create, by the memories you share, by the commitment of time, caring, and love you show to one another, and by the hopes for the future you have as individuals and as a unit.” The Single-Parent Family: Living Happily in a Changing World by Marge Kennedy and Janet Spencer King. New York: Crown, 1994
      “By looking into another person’s life, you need to look into your own. Whether you are the biographer or whether you are the reader. It’s like truth is stranger than fiction. When I am reading a biography, there is something more rewarding about reading about a real person’s life, rather than fiction.” On Writing Biographies: Kevin Fitzpatrick interviews Marion Meade about Buster, Woody, Zelda, and Mrs. Parker for Small Spiral Notebook
      “The art of interviewing is as personal as the art of writing. Every reporter brings a different demeanor and skill to the job of interviewing ... But all interviews are designed to accomplish one mission: Get information to advance a story. This is best achieved with organization and preparation, whether it's a five-minute phone interview or a two-hour confrontational affair.” Les Zaitz, Senior Investigative Reporter for The Oregonian from his tip sheet on interviewing
      "The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn’t discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip." Leon Edel, U.S. biographer, critic. Interview in Writers at Work, Eighth Series
      "Our souls are not hungry for fame, comfort, wealth, or power. Those rewards create almost as many problems as they solve. Our souls are hungry for meaning, for the sense that we have figured out how to live so that our lives matter so the world will at least be a little bit different for our having passed through it." Rabbi Harold Kushner
      "The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it." Benjamin Disraeli
      "All the natural history required to understand consciousness is now readily available in evolutionary biology and psychology. Gene networks organize themselves to produce complex organisms whose brains permit behavior; further evolution enriches the complexity of those brains so that they can create sensory and motor maps that represent the environments they interact with; additional evolutionary complexity allows parts of the brain to talk to each other (figuratively speaking) and generate maps of the organism interacting with its environment. Within the frame of those interactions, the conversation among the maps spontaneously and continuously tells the "story" of our organism responding to and being modified by the environment. (The story is first told without words and is later translated into language when language becomes available, both in biological evolution and in every one of us.)" Antonio Damasio A Story We Tell Ourselves Time Magazine 1/18/2007
      "In all of us there is a hunger, marrow deep, to know our heritage - to know who we are and where we came from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness." 
 Alex Haley, Roots
      "We must remember that a photograph can hold just as much as we put into it, and no one has ever approached the full possibilities of the medium." Ansel Adams
      “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.” Dickens, David Copperfeild, p. 2 1850 edition
      Who made the world?


      Who made the swan, and the black bear?


      Who made the grasshopper?


      This grasshopper, I mean-


      the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,


      who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-

      
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.


      Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.


      Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

      
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

      
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

      
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,


      how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,


      which is what I have been doing all day.


      Tell me, what else should I have done?

      
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

      
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?       Mary Oliver - The Summer Day
      “Like the wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we are, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.” Harlan Ellison
      "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." John Lennon
      "When a parent dies, it's the end. I always wanted to chronicle the family history with my mother. She was always interested in that. I wanted some researchers I'd worked with to talk to my mother, but my mother was a little antsy about it. I know she would've gotten into it. It would have been okay with my father, too. But I wasn't forceful, and I didn't make it happen. That's one regret I have. I didn't get as much of the family history as I could have for the kids. " Robert de Niro, quoted in Esquire

      • WELCOME

      Stefani Twyford Stefani Twyford is a video biographer in Houston Texas whose mission is to help families, individuals, companies and organizations chronicle history, share life stories, connect generations and preserve their legacies in timeless, high-quality multimedia presentations.
      Read more about Stefani...

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