Digitized and Brought to Life

For her photo book, the author was able to clean up pictures using entry-level software, making family history immediate and memorable. (Julia Ewan -- The Washington Post)

Internet services such as SmugMug, Webshots, Snapfish and PhotoSite offer a mix of free and premium services. In addition to publicly displaying images, they can archive back-up copies of images and let people create custom photo-gifts, such as calendars, mugs and pet collars.

The archiving issue looms as one of their big selling points.

"Unfortunately, many consumers are heading for disaster with their digital photos," said Holch. "Only half of consumers we surveyed are thinking about long-term archiving and planning some kind of redundancy." Howard Taub, vice president of Hewlett-Packard's image research lab, recommends not only storing images online or on CDs, but on old-fashioned paper. Good prints make the best archive, he said, because they have a shelf life of at least 100 years and can be rescanned later.

Hewlett-Packard is studying ways to add more automation to digital photography. It also is working on software that might one day tell stories about people's photos automatically, using data from such sources as global-positioning-systems.

Microsoft is pursuing similar visions. It showed off a prototype called SenseCam this year, basically a camera in the form of a pendant or other object people can wear. The SenseCam is programmed to sense scene changes and events in people's lives and automatically take a ton of pictures.

A Photo Chronicle to Keep

Since my forebears had no SenseCam, I decided to use an Internet publishing service to create a photo book that would chronicle the lives of my mother and her parents. I had had good luck with a service called MyPublisher.com, which offers 9-by-12-inch hardcover photo books starting at $20 for 20 pages.

That's when I pulled out the old velvet folder and, one by one, scanned the newspaper clippings into electronic files and cropped the resulting images into formats to fit MyPublisher's automated layout system. (A scanner works like a copier, only it produces an electronic file inside your computer instead of on paper.) I let the photos tell the story, adding only a few pages of text sketching the lives of my actress mother, Angela Walker, and her fashion-buyer mother, Mary Liversedge, who remarried after her first husband, John Holmes, died.

It was emotionally rewarding to scan and brighten the vintage photos and see details for the first time, like my smiling grandmother waving at a crowd from the train taking her to England's southern coast to board a ship for Australia. Her husband had sailed ahead with the "Kangaroos," as his team was called.

Even more moving were the pictures from a year and a half later, my grandmother clutching her infant daughter and waving from a ship in Australia, this time preparing to sail home.

"Tragic News From Australia," proclaimed the headline on one article published in November 1931. It described the cablegram that had arrived in Yorkshire the previous day. "John died this morning, suddenly. Mary," was all it said. His appendix had burst when he was 26.

Their brief marriage had never seemed real to me, at least not until the photos documenting it were digitized, enhanced, blown up and printed in oversized form on glossy pages inside a coffee-table-quality book. The cover contained an enhanced snapshot of my late mother in her youth, in colors so vivid that my father almost could not bear to open it when I gave it to him for his birthday.

At Thanksgiving, I watched as my sister's 15-year-old daughter, Angela -- named after my mother, who was her grandmother, and who died before Angela was born -- flipped through every page in the book. It gave me great joy to watch her study those old photos of my mother, and read the documents chronicling her brief career as a TV actress in London.

Like me, Angela was getting her first close look at the grandparent she had never known.