If you are like me, all your family history lives within multiple photo albums and VHS tapes stored in your parents’ living room cabinets. I love the rare occurrences where we pull them out and talk about the day that the photo was captured, who was still around, and how the block used to look.
What if you could share that family history with the city? These three archival projects are keeping Chicago family stories alive through photographs and videos past and present.
Making Meaning
Black Film Club Collective’s new archival project, Making Meaning, partnered with photographer Kenn Cook Jr. to take beautiful black and white portraits of West Side families. You can submit archival materials like photos and home movies that reflect life on the West Side to their collection.
Nuestro Chicago Archives
This online archive is dedicated to digitizing and showcasing Chicago’s Latine history. The project, founded in 2024, hosts photo-scanning events where Chicagoans can digitize their memories. They accept submissions of photographs taken before 2008.
- 📷 This collection makes me so nostalgic of my childhood in Chicago because it showcases backyard parties, kids playing in open fire hydrants, posing outside of storefronts that no longer exist, or the everyday gatherings with family and friends.
South Side Home Movie Project
This searchable catalog has over 700 digitized home movies shot by South Siders from 1929-1982. The project started over two decades ago with the mission to preserve and celebrate personal histories on the South Side. If you are or were a South Sider, you can gift a film to the collection.
How are you preserving old family photos and home movies? Let us know!
