Ancestry Magazine

It’s the same routine each time John Broggi hears that a hurricane is coming. “I get my family out,” he says. Family always comes first. Mementos like family photos, heirlooms, and other cherished possessions all go in large plastic bags. John intentionally leaves air in each bag so it floats, just to be safe. Then John takes everything up to highest point in his house. It’s a routine that’s worked fine for years.

Until 2005. Until Katrina. “We never had water over the top of the roof before,” says John.

“The water rose so high,” he continues, “it took the bags with air in them and it let them float up there so long—we didn’t return for forty-something days—by the time we got home, those bags were full of water.”

Assessing the damage, John knew everything in the bags, including his family photos, was destroyed. “I had pictures of my father and mother from Italy, and I lost all of those. My sisters? They lost everything, too,” says John. “We didn’t have any pictures.”

New photos, including his daughters’ wedding photos, were also ruined. “One of [the photos] turned colors, a maroon or a brown. My youngest daughter, Julie, half of her face had lines through it,” says John.

Fast Forward
Today, however, John thinks he may have lucked out. Six months after Katrina, a small team of volunteers from Hewlett-Packard (HP) made the trek to New Orleans to try to repair what seemed unfixable. They wouldn’t be able to save every photo that had water damage, but they promised to do the best they could. John, with photos in hand, signed on.

John and the others who took their photos—most already slated for the trash heap—for a quick spruce-up, held out little hope of regaining their lost treasures. Honestly, what could six people working out of the back of a retrofitted Escalade parked in the middle of an empty shell of a senior center do with trash?

Well, says Bob Gann, who headed up the project for HP, those six people could meet, listen, learn, comfort, and scan. They could help the hundreds of people who showed up with family photos sort through those photos to find the ones with the most meaning and then decide which of those photos had the best chance at a new life. That was about all they could do.

But the hundreds of other volunteers stationed at their home computers—homes that spanned the globe from Colorado to Singapore—they could do a lot.

Hands On
How does someone hundreds or thousands of miles away restore a family photo belonging to a stranger? Says Betty Coulman, one of the home-based volunteers, “It was a very personal process. One of the first things you need to do when you’ve never met the person or even seen them, is identify the story [being told by] the picture. The photo I chose to restore was a beautiful wedding photo, but the only white left on it was from a salty deposit. I had to decide what the story was to be told here. I realized it was a love story, a Katrina survivor story that was here.”

Says Lori Simmons who volunteered from her home in Idaho, the trick was to determine how much of a photo was salvageable. The volunteers all knew how to restore a photo, at least from the technical side, but this project was much different than anything they had been dealt before. “We took more care in knowing that it was for someone else and for a good cause,” says Lori.

At times, restoration meant focusing on just a single element of the photo—a person, a couple, a tree, a structure—and trying to bring that component back to life. There was never a guaranty that a restored photo would perfectly match an original; in fact, most of the time, the restored didn’t. But the parts of the photo that really mattered were restored, and that’s what gave the owners hope for reclaiming images they thought were lost forever.

Unveiled
“What they did was miraculous,” says John. “Maybe that’s not the word, but it was fantastic. I can’t even begin to tell you what we brought them. When I saw what they did to my daughters’ pictures, it was amazing. I broke down. It was just overwhelming. I thought they were lost forever.”

In addition to a handful of returned and restored photos, the volunteers also digitized the photos they worked on and provided digital versions to the photo owners; HP left scanners and equipment in New Orleans and set up online storage accounts for digital photo collections for the people whose photos they restored—all just in case this happens again.

For John and the rest of the participants, however, reclaiming memories was the most valuable return of the project. “It gave me a sense that things are not as bad as they look,” says John. “We recovered our treasures. A lot of the stuff we lost, it was just things. But something that I can look at, like my daughters, my children, that’s what’s important.”