8MM Film - Cleaning, Lubricating and Watching

8MM Brownie Projector and Film / Carrie Norwood / CC

Over the summer, my blogs tend to get quiet.  Summer is my time for vacations and relaxing and not working on projects.  But, this summer, I was presented with a really kind of neat genealogy related project.  My aunt sent me about 50 rolls of 8MM film that belonged to my uncle.  It's all from the early to mid 50s and chronicles the lives of my mom, her brothers and my grandparents during that time.  Having never met my grandfather, I'm pretty excited about the prospect of seeing him in motion.

At first, I thought this would be easy peasy.  Just snag a projector and watch it, with an ultimate goal of digitizing it.  But the more the process has unfolded, the more it is like a treasure hunt with this end goal of having a good quality representation of this era of life in my family.

8MM film, while all the rage in the 50s and 60s, is not used any more.  It hasn't been used since about then.  So the equipment and supplies are tough to come by and the knowledge of how to use and maintain them properly is sparse.  The particular films I'm working with don't appear to have been kept very well... although, to be fair, it doesn't seem like proper film storage supplies are plentiful and at the time, I doubt anyone thought someone would be struggling to watch them 60 years later.  So the films themselves need some maintenance before they can really be watched - including cleaning, lubricating (who knew film needed lubrication!?) and potentially repair.

Getting your DNA into gedmatch

There are many companies that you can get your DNA processed with for genetic genealogy purposes. The big three are 23andme, ftdna and ancestry.  Once you have your DNA done on one of those sites (or others), you can use the tools on that site to 'match' with other users of that same site.  

However, the potential genealogy discoveries you can make are limited to the tools (and quality) that site offers as well as the people who have chosen to get their DNA processed by that site.  For a fee, FTDNA and ancestry both give you the option to import DNA from other sites, so many people choose to download their DNA data from the original site and import it into other sites.  This gives you a broader toolset to use as well as more potential matches. 

If only there were a site that were free, had a huge toolset and a huge user base!  Enter gedmatch.  Gedmatch does have paid tiers to support the site but there is a whole lot you can do without paying anything, and users from all of the big three, plus other sites have uploaded their DNA there, giving you a much larger and more diverse user base to test against.