Family Business

I want to apologize.  Lately I've not been doing too much in the way of posting.  Initially (January and early February), I'd become lax in my writing because I was burned out on the Trump Lists.  I'm so happy I stopped doing those.  The last three days alone would have been enough to make a list longer than the three week stint I posted in early January.  It's like a snowball rolling down a hill.

The last two weeks, I've been deep in a personal project which is very dear to me.  I'm trying to preserve personal gold.  My grandfather, Emerson Duncan McNeil Jr., was an avid photographer.  He made the most wonderful photo books when he was growing up.  This is one of my favorite photos, from the late 1910's, of my Great Great Grandfather, James Scott McNeil, holding the drum he carried for the Union in the Civil War.

And you wonder why I have no love lost for the Confederacy...for me, it goes beyond defeating the scourge of slavery.  It was a family matter.

My great grandparents on my father's side were both wealthy; big fish in a small pond. One was the town doctor, the other a foreman for one of the mines on the Iron Range.  Their two kids got married, and it was like local royalty being wed.  They were young and living in the roaring 20's, a time of great wealth in America, where the wealthy got wealthier.  

In the 1920's, my grandfather was given the newest high tech toy of the age, a 16 millimeter personal home movie camera.  This would be the equivalent of getting the newest iPhone of the age, one which wasn't available to the public.  Back then, it would be decades (40's/50's) before most people got their own home movie cameras.  He was making films when most people still didn't have photo cameras yet.  He got his movie camera (guessing) around Christmas 1928.  I can peg this pretty close because I have film of my father the day after he was born, in late March of 1929.  Those were some of the earliest films grandpa made.  My grandfather made many films, and although the camera he made them with is long gone, I do have the reels themselves.

When my father moved south for health reasons last year, I asked about the films.  As a history nut, one of the things which made me think was how I'd never seen any home movies from the 1920's to the 1940's, and wondered how many existed.  Sure movies of the day are still around (although many cinema films from before 1925 are lost to time), and I've seen news reels from the day, although not too many of them exist either.  Home movies from the 1920's and 30's?  I don't think I'd ever seen more than one or two, outside of my grandfather's.  Most home movies you see from long ago are 1950's and later.

I called the Minnesota Historical Society and talked with their film curator.  She was immediately very interested in what was on these films.  She said there are very few home movies from the era, and she had never heard of any coming from the Iron Range.  It also was an added bonus that longtime radio legend Cedric Adams, my great uncle, is featured in some of them.  She told me these films are likely the first from the region, and without a doubt, the only non-news reel films from the Iron Range she'd heard of.  The movies of the towns and lakes I had were likely the first ever made of those areas.

Since that day in Spring of 2017, I've been working on getting the films professionally cleaned and preserved (pricey!!!), and over President's Day this year, I took digital copies of them south, and went over them with my father, identifying the people, places and dates the best we could.  I'm in the process of handing these historic records over to the Minnesota Historical Society for preservation. I would love to keep them myself, but they are too important to Minnesota, and frankly my house is not the environment they should be stored in. 

That is what's been taking up my time.  Family business, but one of the greatest projects I've ever had the privilege of being a part of.