For more than a year now I have been sorting, digitizing and restoring the photos of Eva Gold, my mother-in-law. I have learned a lot about her and her era. The resilience she showed was amazing. So watch the video and then click read more to see my notes on the process of making it.

How I made the video:

Eva started to have serious memory loss in the last few years. and I knew that if I wanted to tell Eva’s story before it was lost I had to get going. Unfortunately all I had were the photos of her life in a jumble of albums and her spotty stories of events. Fortunately while I was digitizing the photos using the PhotoScan app from Google, I came across an email that Eva had written to her namesake distant relative in Canada about twenty years ago. I bought a lapel microphone from youmic.com and had Eva read the email. This became the center of the story. My technical skills weren’t good enough to pull the soundtrack, the video and the still photographs together and after a series of failed attempts I found through the son, Scott Kirschenbaum, of my friends Bob and Ellen a film editor Annekathrin Rothe who was able, for not a lot of money, to bring it all together.

Some of the problems we ran into were: There were holes in the photographic record, for instance when the family was poor and escaping Hitler they didn’t have the resources to take a lot of photos. There were people who it was hard to identify. And selecting the photos that would fit the narrative meant that there were a lot left out. Anni helped me get through all of it.

After all of this I believe I am now the worlds expert on the Nesselroths of Germany.