Magnetic Memories: The Clock is Ticking!
How do you capture your family memories? Digital files, printed photographs, film negatives, and magnetic tape are some common methods. Each has its pros and cons, but perhaps none is more fragile than magnetic tape. Developed in the late 1920s, magnetic tape is made with iron oxide bonded to a plastic substrate. The resulting tape is wound onto reels and uses electromagnetism to read and write information. Familiar tape formats include cassettes and 8-tracks for audio or VHS and Betamax for video.
As previously mentioned, magnetic tape is fragile. If you have ever had cassette unspool in an audio player or a VHS tape jam in a VCR, then you will understand why. Tape is flimsy, easily wrinkled, and difficult to fix once damaged. Worst of all, magnetic tape has a relatively short lifespan. While printed photographs and film negatives can last for a century or more, tape decays more quickly. Even when stored under archival conditions, a tape may only last a few decades—the blink of an eye in genealogical terms!
Magnetic tape was once ubiquitous, thanks to the rise of home audio and video in the 1970s. Many families had access to recording devices by the 1980s and video camcorders were one of the must-have consumer electronics of the 1990s. While cassettes were used to capture analog audio, VHS and Hi8 were popular tape format for analog video.
Canon camcorder ad from 1982
By the early 2000s, tape was still the best technology for recording video, though newer camcorders used digital tape formats such as Digital8 and MiniDV. Eventually, the declining price of solid-state memory chips and the widespread availability of smartphones led to the demise of magnetic tape. Old audio cassettes and VHS tapes were thrown into boxes, packed away in basements or attics, and forgotten.
But the clock never stopped ticking. Tough as it may be to believe, home videos shot in the 1980s are approaching 40 years old—well past the expiration date of the tape they were recorded upon. Family birthday parties, weddings, reunions, graduations, and other major milestones may all soon be lost, if they are not properly digitized and stored for long-term preservation.
This thought had been in the back of my mind for awhile. After all, my family had access to audio and video recorders in the 1980s and owned a camcorder by the early 1990s. However, I didn’t take action until after my sister, Julie, had paid to have a VHS tape from 1991 digitized. What a joy it was to see my maternal grandparents, Roy and Ethel (Brandt) Gutshall, alive again! Hearing their voices conjured all sorts of childhood memories and brought them back to life in a way that no mere picture could.
Digitizing old tapes isn’t easy, which is why most people opt to hire a professional to do this. There are a variety of services, both local and national, that can help with the process too. Depending upon the number of tapes you have, digitization costs may range anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand dollars. Seeing that my family had a lot of tapes in a variety of formats, I began to investigate if I could do this myself.
Converting analog tape to digital files requires the right equipment: something to playback the tape, a device to convert the analog signal to a digital one, and a computer to capture the digital signal to a file. After talking to a few people, I managed to scrounge up a VCR and two camcorders. One camcorder could play Hi8 tapes and the other, a Sony VX2000, could read MiniDV tapes. The VX2000 had the added bonus of being able to convert an analog signal to a digital one, so I could connect the VCR and Hi8 to the VX2000 camcorder then pipe its output to a computer.
The only problem was that the VX2000 used a now unsupported cable to connect to a computer—FireWire 400. I was going to have to convert from this to a modern USB-C connector. Doing that required several other cables daisy chained together. The final cabling was as follows: the VX2000 camcorder to FireWire 400 to Firewire 800 to Thunderbolt to USB-C to the computer. Yes, that’s right. It took four cables to get from an old camcorder to a current computer!
But it was all worth it, and soon I was digitizing my first tapes. However, I quickly hit another snag. The VX2000 was malfunctioning. Sadly, the 23-year-old camcorder had some mechanical issues. Thankfully, there were two repair shops in the United States that specialize in fixing this camcorder. I sent the VX2000 to Video Electronics in North Reading, Massachusetts for repair. In less than a week, it was back and working perfectly. I was back in business. Now the hard work started.
Tape by tape, I converted and catalogued decades of old video footage. There were some real treasures to be found, such as the home movies my sisters and I made as kids. Another highlight was watching the 60th wedding anniversary celebration for my Hagenbuch grandparents, Homer and Irene (Faus) Hagenbuch. I even located an old audio cassette of myself learning to talk as a baby. What a joy it was to watch and listen to these moments again!
There was some disappointment, though. A few tapes were degraded and tough to play. One, in particular, gave me a lot of trouble. It was a VHS tape of a school project called The History of Dillsburg that I made in 1990 when I was in third grade. The tape unspooled and jammed the VCR. I extracted it, then manually rewound the tape by removing it from its case and winding the reels by hand. When I got the tape to play, I discovered that the school project had been recorded over. Unfortunately, the tab on the tape case that would have prevent future recordings had never been pulled.
Repairing VHS tapes. The magnetic tape reels are visible at the bottom.
Presently, I have completed over 70 tapes, and there are still many more to digitize. I hope to finish these over the next few months. It’s a substantial undertaking, one that I hope will pay dividends in the years to come. By backing up and properly storing the digital files, my hope is that they will help future generations to know their ancestors in a way that wasn’t possible before the 20th century.
If you are reading this and have audio or video tapes full of family memories, remember that the clock is ticking! Magnetic tape has a finite lifespan and very soon it will be impossible to share these moments with loved ones.
