How to Save Your Family Tree with the Help of VHS to Digital Conversion?

Family history is one of the most important things you should try to preserve. It’s something you can share both with your parents and grandparents and with your children, increasing your bond and letting you gain insights about what your relatives have been through or achieved in the past. 

But while having a written history of your family tree is an integral part of the process, text alone can sometimes be a little dry. Supplementing it with images and videos can bring any family tree to life and ensure that the memories get preserved for future generations. 

But how can you preserve these visual records of your family tree? 

Well, one of the best ways to do it is to use a convert VHS to digital service, although it’s also possible to do at least parts of the project yourself. 

Let’s explore the steps you’ll need to take below so that you can make the best decision in your situation.

Why Should You Preserve Family Videos? 

Most people don’t associate home videos with their family tree, instead imagining large graphs with many branches detailing their family history. 

But while that’s certainly one way to look at a family tree, it’s missing one key element: visuals. 

When you have a written chart, you can look at the birth dates, family names, and some other relevant information, but you can’t see who those people were, how they talked, what they liked.

That’s where home footage can be so valuable. 

Most families have at least some video records of their family, whether it’s of their children, themselves, or even their parents or grandfathers. 

All of these can serve as essential records for future generations, helping them to have a much more immersive family tree experience and really get to know the people that came before them.

This can be incredibly valuable for your children and yourself as well. It will ensure that the memory of your parents and grandparents stays fresh in your mind, and you can relive those memories without the risk of the old VHS tapes deteriorating since everything will be protected in a secure digital format. 

What Can You Do Yourself? 

Now that we’ve understood the importance of preserving the home VHS tapes containing family memories, let’s look at what you could potentially do yourself.

Going the DIY route is one of the first things people consider because a bulk video or bulk photo scanning service is not something that many people even know exists.

But while you can do some of the tasks of digitizing your VHS collection yourself, you might have a harder time with aspects that require more experience or advanced tools.

Whether you will try to do things on your own or use a convert VHS to digital service, the first step will always be the same. You’ll need to take out all of the boxes with old VHS tapes from storage and go through them, analyzing what they contain and which ones need to be preserved.

You may find that not all of them contain family footage, and some might not even be home footage at all, and instead contain movies or TV shows.

As you go through the collection, start setting aside the ones you want to digitize and label each one according to its contents. This will ensure that you won’t have to repeat the process and will always know precisely what each tape contains. 

Now, when it comes to digitizing the tapes themselves, things get a little more tricky. 

To make it work, you will need special equipment that you probably don’t have at home. Here are your options:

1. If you have a VHS player, you could get a DVD player, connect them together, and burn a DVD from the analog footage, digitizing it in the process. 

2. Alternatively, you could buy a combo VHS to DVD recorder, which is a single device that will handle the entire process for you. The problem is, these are typically not easy to find since they have been out of production for a long time.

However, both of these approaches have significant drawbacks. For one thing, this equipment can be harder to source, and then you also have to figure out how to connect everything together.

And you might also find that with consumer-grade equipment, the quality of the digitized footage won’t be what you want it to be, especially since VHS tapes tend to deteriorate in quality as the years go by as well. 

Because of that, finding a bulk photo scanning service that can handle your videos is probably the smartest choice. 

How to Hire a Professional VHS Digitization Service? 

Eventually, most people who want to enhance their family tree with a digitized video collection conclude that hiring professionals is the way to go. 

But then, they need to find the right service provider. And that can be a challenge in itself. 

So, how should you choose the right company to work with? 

Well, for one thing, look at the types of services they offer and make sure that it includes VHS tape digitization. You should also read more about their process and look for a provider that offers video editing and restoration.

Sometimes, VHS tapes won’t have ideal quality footage, so you’ll need a provider that can restore the quality so that it’s more enjoyable to watch in a digital format. 

You should also think about what format you want to receive the newly-digitized footage in.

For instance, you could get them in DVDs that will be labeled and sorted, allowing you to easily upload them on your computer and share them with friends.

But it’s also possible to just get them delivered through cloud storage, allowing you to access them more quickly and avoiding the necessity of storing the DVDs.

One note to remember is that whichever way you choose, make sure to have multiple copies of the digital files. You never know what might happen to your computer hard drive or external disc, so having multiple copies will give you peace of mind knowing that the precious family tree footage is protected.