An Unintentional Legacy
In the fall of 2001, just 5 weeks after the 9-11 attacks, I traveled to England to visit my family. It had been a while since I’d been back to the UK, and I was long overdue for a chat with my aunts and uncles and cousins, and my one remaining grandparent.
This is similar to the Sony HandiCam that I took to the UK in October 2001. It uses Hi-8 mini tapes to record on.
On something of a whim, I borrowed my friend Marc’s Sony Camcorder, the kind that uses Hi-8 mini tapes as the recording medium. He had upgraded to more sophisticated gear, and let me take it with me. I bought a few tapes, and thought it might be fun to show my American friends what the English countryside looked like.
One morning, while chatting with my Aunt Hilary (my dad’s older sister), the subject turned to her childhood in London, before WWII began. As she began to recount her memories, it dawned on me that I had that video camera in my luggage upstairs. I ran up and grabbed it — thankfully the battery was fully charged — and put it on a pile of books on the coffee table, pointed it at her, and hit RECORD. I then had her start again, and tell me everything.
Hilary and I talked for a couple of hours while the camera rolled, and then I asked my uncle Vincent some questions as well, to complete the story. (Several days later on that same trip, I did the same thing with my Grandmother.)
You don’t know what you’ve got, till it’s gone.
Hilary was buried in January of 2002, and her husband Vincent joined her in late 2015. Photo by Paul Davies.
Upon returning to the US, I stashed the tapes away, thinking that one day they might be interesting to watch. Little did I know how soon that would be.
In December of that same year, Hilary was hospitalized, and it was discovered that the cancer that she’d been treated for 10 years earlier had returned, and with a vengeance. She passed away before New Year’s Eve. In early January of 2002 I was back in the UK to attend her funeral. (And, as it happens, my grandmother died the following December.)
I was aware that I had something valuable on those tapes, but at the time I wasn’t sure what to do with them. A year or two later, I copied them on to VHS and sent copies to some relatives, and a few years after that, when technology permitted, I digitized them and saved the files to several different hard drives.
The time has come.
For years I’ve been thinking about what to do with these treasures I’ve had stored away. Two years ago, when my dad died suddenly, I got serious about the need to capture the stories of our loved ones — in their own words and voices — and preserve them for future generations. Thus was born our Legacy Life Project.
Finally getting around to editing the video shot in October 2001… nearly 20 years ago. Better late than never, I guess.
Now that I have plenty of free time on my hands, while we are all on voluntary quarantine during this CoronaVirus pandemic, I decided it was time to finally do something with those old recordings. So I’ve watched all the hours of footage, and edited them into some kind of order. I’m excited to share with my cousins (Hilary’s kids), and their children, who were either very young, or not yet born when Hilary died.
To illustrate the value of recordings like these, I’ve included a couple of short clips of Hilary talking about what it was like to live in London during the blitz. Nightly air raids by the German Luftwaffe starting in 1939, when Hilary was 7, were a fact of life for Londoners throughout the war. Her vivid recollections, and her matter-of-fact descriptions, bring home the impact of that time, and will for generations to come.
Hilary describes what it was like to be in London during the air raids of WWII, and to sit and wait for the bombs to fall.
Hilary talks about the danger of shrapnel from German bombs on the streets of London, and what she and her brother did to help.
To learn more about our project to record and archive your loved ones’ stories, in their own words, for the benefit of future generations, visit Legacy Life Project. There are packages to fit every need, and the FAQ should answer most questions you may have.