Texas Living By Bill Marvel

October 2004 — Almost every family has a hidden history. It's buried in envelopes of old snapshots and yellow Kodachrome boxes, packed away in closets or bottom drawers. Year after year it lies there unvisited, unseen—the photo of Grandma feeding her chickens, the fading color slides of that Yellowstone vacation, the home movies of Christmas, 1964.

A few people eventually get around to starting a scrapbook. That's what Merle Volding thought he'd do when he retired 15 years ago. Then he and his wife, Marian, went traveling. More photos piled up. They bought a summer home in Crested Butte, Colo. He took up skiing, hiking, mountain biking.

When he finally got around to doing something with those old pictures, he turned them into not just a scrapbook but a Volding family documentary on DVD, complete with narration and music. Then he went on to write a book that shows, step by step, how any family with a PC or a Mac, but not much expertise or experience, can do the same thing.

Self-published and spiral-bound, Family History DVD is available in either a Mac or a PC version from Mr. Volding's Web site, for the time being. But he is talking to a chain of genealogical bookstores about wider distribution. And at least one school systen is using it for a fourth-grade computer class.

“I'm kind of an active character,” says Mr. Volding, in something of an understatement. “I can't sit and read and watch television.”

Now 80, the former accountant, computer programmer and entrepreneur says he'd always planned to do something with those photographs and home movies. But sorting through boxs of old family pictures, many still in their original envelopes, didn't seem like a good use of his retirement until about eight years ago, when a California couple rented the simmer home next door in Crested Butte.

“They were conducting a seminar on something called digital storytelling,” Mr. Volding says. “I asked, ‘What's that?' and they invited me to attend the first session.”

Digital storytelling was then a revolutionary new way of using technology to transform documents, photos, moving pictures and sound into stories that could be shown and shared on a computer screen.

Mr. Volding immediately saw the possibilities.

“I thought, ‘Wow, that's what I ought to do with those old pictures!'” Unfortunately, he learned, the necessary hardware would cost about $50,000, and the software was unbelievably complicated.

He put the idea aside for five more years. Then he got a brochure from Apple computer for iMovie, a program that allows any Mac owner to create digital stories on his home computer. And the price was right: Mr. Volding could download the software for free.

Along the way there were some discoveries and some disappointments.

Color slides taken during scuba dives with his son had been ruined by termites—a devastating reminder of he importance of safeguarding family pictures.

On the other hand, much remained.

“We had a lot of 8mm home movies starting from the early 1950s, when our oldest kids were little and we would spend part of our summers on the farm.

His great-grandparents had settled the Iowa farm there when they came over from Norway . He located a relative in Arizona , the daughter of his dad's cousin. The cousin had lived to 90, it turned out, and had spent summers in the Old Country. Late in life, his daughter had taken him back to the old Iowa homestead and made a video as the old gent walked around reminiscing.

“Our family history starts with the great-grandparents coming over in 1851,” he says. “There are old pictures of Norway , then we leap forward to the 150 th reunion at the Lutheran Church , in 2001.”

Other old family documents surfaced—invitations, Christmas cards, wedding announcements. All of it found its way into the family history Mr. Volding was creating.

“I was surprised I had as many pictures as I did from World War II,” he says. He had planned to start that part of the family story with a snapshot of himself in uniform—“I look like a 14-year-old kid”—taken in California before he shipped out to the South Pacific for duty as a cryptographer.

But as he began work, he found a Life magazine with pictures of the attack on Pearl Harbor . Then he visited a music store and bought several CDs of music from the World War II era. When he took them home, he says, he discovered one of the tracks was a recording of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's famous “Day of Infamy” speech and from the Life photo to the snapshot of the awkward kid in uniform, he created something that went beyond the usual family album to a documentary that placed the family in historical context.

It took Mr. Volding two years of trial and error to put it all together. Then friends and relatives started asking him to show them how he did it.

That's when he started work on the book.

“I had bought a couple books on iMovies,” he says. “But they were technical and had about 10 time as much information as I needed to know.” So he set out to create the kind of book he would have liked to have had at his elbow when he was starting.

“It's step by step, I was trying to write for people who don't have any computer experience.” Each step not only tells the reader what to do next, which files to open, which to close, but shows what the screen is going to look like after each step.

“One of our friends is a schoolteacher in Crested Butte,” Mr. Volding says. “Her 70-year-old mother was visiting, and she had never worked on a computer. I got her a new Mac and sat her down. She made notes as she went along, and I made changes on 47 pages as a' result of what she told me.

“Ive has a pretty good time doing this,” he says. The Crested Butte school system has been using the book since last September on a fourth-grade computer class. “They said, ‘We want our kids to learn to use the computer, but we want them to do something worthwhile with it, not just play games.'”

Students in the class bring in photos of themselves, starting with their baby pictures, he says, “and they put together little stories.”

That's the whole point he says: the stories.

“True genealogists work with charts and stuff like that,” he says. “I like the storytelling part. I've learned to keep the stories short. If they get too long, they get boring.

“We found out life is made up not of one big story, but many, many short stories.”

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