Finding My Roots
2020: The Prelude,
What started as a hobby during the pandemic turned into a career and passion to restore family photos and articles to preserve for my family and the generation to come. After graduating from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2018. I started a job in the Audiovisual field doing production work uptown Charlotte. What I loved about production work was being behind the scenes of every event. Seeing the process of each show from the start to finish. Testing microphones, and setting up theatrical lighting. In March of 2020, after a year into my position, I was furloughed for next following year. Within that year, After a whole year of uncertainty, I decided to move back home to be closer to my extended family.
2021: The Exposition,
In April 2021, I moved back, after a year of being furloughed. From this, I started to spend more time with those who impacted me the most growing up. After moving back, I’ve noticed, how different Chapel Hill, NC has changed in the five years that I’ve been away. I started to reminisce on how times and things used to be growing up in Chapel Hill. I figured if things have changed this much for me, I wonder how much it has changed from my mother's (Baby Boomer) and grandmother’s (Silent Generation) perspective. From that, I started to ask those questions about how their life was growing up and the memories they had. Luckily enough, my mother archived all her siblings and our childhood memories, being a former photographer. However, I knew my grandmother's story would be different being that she grew up Pre-Board vs Education, that she grew up while her great-grandmother was living, Nellie Strayhorn, and that she could recall and that she has inherit ways that her great-grandmother has taught her growing up.
2022: The Rising Action,
One day, I started to do some spring cleaning and I saw an ad for scanning family photo albums using an app. So I decided to take the opportunity to scan my family’s photo album into the digital world. I started with my mother’s collection and ended up scanning my grandmother’s archives as well. In total, I have scanned 5,000+ photos and archived over 10,000 from floppy disks to wiping off old computer hard drives. After collecting over 10,000 documents, files and photos. I’m in the process of how to organize and compiling them into one singular file or system for those to follow after me. Putting a name and face with time and date to photo scanned.
2023: The Climax,
What started as a hobby, ended up being a career for me, and launching Created Memories LLC Media Company. Currently, I am a Member of the U.S. Press Association and the National Association for Black Journalists. I use what I learned in school, my career, and personal experience and apply them to my work. I want others to follow their passion and take that leap of faith in their passion. To ask those hard questions, do their research and learn from their failures, and not make the same mistake twice. Every day its a new experience or something you can always learn. So I take this concept and apply this to my company.
