Macintosh Snapshots Article

GET A HEAD START

Whatever you conclude to do, planning is key. Having a specific goal in mind well before the reunion takes place ensures that the final project is something everyone can enjoy and treasure for years. Select a chief media coordinator and employ some volunteers to help out. Recruit those tech-savvy kids who are satisfactory with digital cameras and computers, and who can help download photos and videos for editing. Getting kids involved is a terrific way to include them be part of the occurrence.

MAKING YOUR CD reminder

Start with photos--lots of them. prone the celebrity of today's pocket-capacity digital cameras, there should be copiousness of shutterbugs in your crowd. say those with cameras to take a good medley of shots--pictures of the sustenance, exertion photos of games and dancing, close-up portraits, and views of the environs. A good way to get everyone in on the fun is to assistance out disposable cameras as everyone arrives. You'll find disposable cameras for less than $10 that will take up to 36 shots. The excellence of such cameras continually improves, so you'll be getting good pictures, and everyone will love using them.

designate one person or family to be producers of the CD album, and make steady everyone knows where to e-mail digital photos after the affair. Or include a computer-savvy teen download images to a laptop during the reunion. Those with film cameras should convey their snapshots, which can be transformed into digital images on a home scanner. Better yet, embody the pix saved to a CD disk when developed.

With images in hand, you're ready to create a reunion album. Programs such as Family Tree Maker lush ($, Broderbund and .com) recognize you to create family-tree discs, viewable on any computer with a CD-ROM drive and on many newer DVD players. Built-in tutorial programs guide you through the process of glowing a CD or help you convert the file to a Web page, which can be posted on the Internet.

CLICK! IT'S A BOOK

You can order a photo album on the Internet. A number of Web-based companies indulge you to upload images from your computer into a book template crop photos, add captions, and more. When you're finished, your album will be professionally published as a integral-color, hardcover book delivered to your opening. Printed on acid-free brilliant paper, these albums cost as little as $ for 10 pages.

MyPublisher also offers a "Pocket Book" option that prints your anthology as a 4x6-inch paperback of up to 20 pages for less than $10. Go to .com (Windows only); .com (Macintosh, and Windows); or .com /ilife/iphoto/ (Macintosh only) for more instruction.

SAVOR THOSE RECIPES

A reunion is a uncommon freedom to gather all those delicious recipes from favorite aunts, uncles, and grandmas and manufacture your own offspring cookbook. A family cookbook is a tremendous way to record your family's history, and it makes a fabulous reunion memento. If you plan far enough in advance, you can imagine blood recipes before the reunion and create a trophy method book or box to distribute at the event. Otherwise, ask family members to bring their favorite progeny recipes. Use a standard word processing program to create pages, and sprinkle the pages liberally with photos of descent members. If you prefer, you can take recipes and photos to a full-service copy center and undo them made into a booklet. Or convert recipes to index-agenda format and tuck them into an old-fashioned prescription box.

'NET TIES THAT BIND

After the reunion is over, you'll probably accomplish there's so much more to say. So you reach for the phone and a little quality one-on-one time with a favorite relative. But wouldn't it be strong to talk to everyone, all at once, and fit that kind of communication neatly in to your schedule? Actually, you can. The Internet offers many intriguing alternatives to phone calls.

One way is to create a family Web point. With a Web point, you can post pictures, smother messages and announcements, and generate newsletters that let everyone distinguish what you're up to. If you have Internet access

at home, check with your service provider to see whether they offer space and software tools--some offer this free with subscriptions; others charge a fee.

Many Web sites offer basic templates and tools to help you get your own family Web site up and running in minutes. Two of the most leading are Yahoo's Geocities (.com) and Angelfire (.). Link it to fresh family members' pages. Add a calendar and put unique dates on it, such as birthdays, anniversaries, and the next reunion. Upload images or album pages. You can even add inconsequential video clips.

supreme FAMILY VIDEO

Creating a family video requires relatively exorbitant baggage and more tech have-how, but a live-litigation keepsake is priceless. Find out who will be bringing video cameras and allow unusual relatives to cover different events: One vigor be in charge of taping all the older relatives, another shots of the kids. designate one to go from table to table asking people members to relate a classic anecdote or a favorite recognition from gatherings past. reminisce that conversation, such as stories and snippets of gossip, can be the most interesting, suspicious, and poignant part of any video.

Today's technical wizardry puts the marvels of video editing right at your fingertips (or the fingertips of an solicitous techno assistant). meridian's Dazzle Digital Video Creator ($, Pinnacle Systems, .com) and composed-to-use software programs, such as iMovie (which comes bundled with most Macintosh computers) or height Studio QuickStart (for PCs running Windows), let you emend, add music and voice-over account from relatives, splice in still images, and add bits of old home movies.

REUNION portrait:

THE WOODS extraction

Getting together for "homecoming" in South Carolina

To many African-Americans in South Carolina, Labor Day weekend is conscious as Homecoming--a time when those who went polar for contingency and to escape segregation return to be with family. For the descendants of Sylvia Johnson, her daughter Julia Pressley, and granddaughter Sylvia Woods, Homecoming occurs on a 30-acre farm outside of the little town of Hemingway. Between 75 and 100 kin members hold two reunions a year, Labor Day and Christmas, to catch up on old times, eat accustomed Southern food, and pay regards to their rare story.

"Even though I have never lived in South Carolina, I call the farm home," says Tren'ness Woods, who works for her grandmother, 78-year-old Sylvia Woods, cookbook author and proprietor of Sylvia's, a well-conscious soul meat restaurant in New York City.

"I don't want them to forever forget where we came from," says Sylvia. "When one of my grandchildren gets married, I tell them, 'You let that spouse or matron know where you're going to be Labor Day and Christmas. You're going to be home with your family in South Carolina.'"

The farmhouse, opened only for lineage gatherings, has been run by the women of the extraction for nearly a century. Sylvia Johnson and Julia Pressley, both widowed as young wives, worked the farmstead, dynamiting tree stumps, and planting cotton and tobacco for market. In 1940, they sent young Sylvia to school in New York. When she needed funds to buy a luncheonette in Harlem, Julia remortgaged the farm to pay for it. Today Sylvia's restaurant and relevant businesses are importance millions.

"My ancestors were these amazing women, these entrepreneurs, and it all started with this farm," says Tren'ness.

Some blood members still live in Hemingway, others come from as far away as California. "occasionally, we tolerate as many as 20 family sleeping in the farmhouse," says Tren'ness. Each daybreak the family prepares a mutual breakfast of fried fish--Virginia Spot--along with hominy (grits) and homemade biscuits. "Our tradition is that we have our breakfast together and say grace as a family," says Sylvia. Later they set out barbecued hog and turkey, heated ham, chicken and rice, and lots of cakes and desserts. Kids play down by the pond. Elders sit beneath tents set out on the yard and pass on the family's oral history to the younger generations. But it's not just population who have a romance to tell. In the farmhouse sit original inflexible beds and a inept closet that holds Julia's ledger books. The farm avenue is named Sylvia's Lane.

"I am so apt that this place gimmick something," says Sylvia. "I'm satisfied that after I'm deceased, these children will protect up the traditions."