LifeStories Alive specializes in making personal history videos for families that value their heritage. We create family heirlooms in video – digitally mastered records of life stories with personal accounts, photos and mementos of family history.
This is a labor love; of a quest to bring increasingly disconnected generations closer together. The inspiration came from two experiences: Stories that LifeStories Alive founder Mike O'Krent’s parents told about his great-grandfather, a man Mike never knew, but was told he was like; and Mike’s experiences interviewing Holocaust survivors for Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. At LifeStories Alive, we go beyond faded, static photographs and capture the essence of a person complete with speech, mannerisms, and visuals. We celebrate personal journeys for the benefit of those who follow. With today’s digital DVD technology, and a little forethought, priceless generational links and personal anecdotes can be preserved for virtually eternity.
And yet we are losing these precious personal memories every day. The pre-baby boomer generation (i.e. those born before 1946) is characterized by humility bordering on shyness. Many lived through the Great Depression and WWII and are hesitant to tell their stories or believe future generations would find their lives dull and uneventful. Nothing could be further from the truth. For those of The Greatest Generation, their life stories are almost without exception stories of perseverance; inspiration comes to all who follow and benefit from their pluck and sacrifice.
“I urge you to pursue preserving your personal history to allow your children and grandchildren to know who you were as a child and to know what your hopes and dreams were” Oprah Winfrey