Memories of Nan
by si on 2025-06-24 16:51
Remembering my recently passed Nan thanks to an unbroken chain of historical, technical moves. Hitting some remaining current challenges in gathering current memories.
A couple of weeks ago, we said a final goodbye to my Nan. I shared a birthday, although hers came first in 1928. I'll be sorry to celebrate it alone this year.
The funeral was well executed. Along with her three sons, I carried her into the crematorium, and the celebrant gave an overview of her life. Mostly names, dates and waypoints in her life - maybe a mention about her love of cats. Then there was a carousel of photos selected by my Dad and Uncles, played to the sound of Sinatra.
The next day, I found a set of videos of interviews that I'd recorded with Nan in 2007, on a camcorder. At some point, I'd managed to digitise the tape recordings to an external hard drive. Later, I'd backed the files up to Dropbox as the hard drive became increasing vulnerable and inaccessible.
One minute of it contains more of her character than the whole funeral service. She was old enough to look back on a full life but well enough to pick out its fine detail. In one recording she describes her experience of being evacuated during the war as a 10 year old and begrudgingly billeted with strangers. I have nephews this age now, and I'm hoping this would allow them to see who she was had to go into care.
We went to my uncle's for the wake, where an album and a box of photos were produced. A lot of these were new to me even though I'd spent a lot of time systematically scanning in all the family photos I could find. My father and uncle decided to divide the photos between them. Scanning is tedious work with little reward in the short term, and annotation is even harder.
My Grandad - her first husband - was also there (born 1924!). My mobile made it way easier to record and save memories than in 2007, and I recorded a few snippets. I was also reassured that they would be automatically backed up on Google Photos which I use and trust. Photos can even be automatically be shared with family members there but there's limited interaction.
Really, the hard part now was coming up with good questions on the spot without slipping into the overfamiliar war years groove. My Grandad still has the stories but we don't see each other often enough and I don't know where to start.