My Family's Home Movies: 1930s to Present
When my parents passed away in the 1960s they left about a dozen movie films. The oldest of these have the name DOWLING in the title and were taken in the 1930s by my mother, Saidee E Dowling Wood. of her uncles, aunts, and cousins in St. Petersburg Florida but others were taken elsewhere. One was even of a steamboat trip she took to Cuba in 1938 with her friend Susie Sims. There were also a few videos of me as a baby and growing up.
As I got older, I took videos of my family: my children, grandchildren, pets, vacations, and holidays.
Just recently, my 1st cousin Robert W Dowling discovered even more films shot by his parents, Herbert L and Ruth Flood Dowling. The first two he sent included me in my first year in Michigan and, on my first birthday in 1945 with with Bob's older bother Richard on the beach on Treasure Island Florida. This second video also showed us at our grandmother Ethel McDaniel Dowling's home in St. Pete.
My wife Sylvia's parents, Ben and Jackie Zoz Ventura, also took videos of their family growing up. These were digitized and then put on DVD. When I have time, I will also upload these.
Most of the above movies started out on 8mm film, advanced to Super 8, were digitized and then put on DVDs. With the advent of YouTube, they were reformatted and uploaded to the web. More recently, and with the popularity of smartphones, it became very easy to send them directly to YouTube since it was no longer necessary to digitize the films. Even editing has become easy.
As of today, I have over 40 of these videos available online for you to enjoy. You can find them at My YouTube Content Channel.
Note that on each video's page, there is a title and a short description just below the video itself. By clicking on Show More, you can find out even more about the video and in many cases see where the video was taken, when it was taken and who is in it.
I would really appreciate your feedback on these videos. Please either leave it in the Comment section below the video or, use my Compiler link at the bottom of each page on my site to email it to me.
Feel free to share these videos. However, in order to help others find them and this website, please honor the Creative Commons license (found at the bottom of the page) by giving this website credit by including the link to this site every where you share them.
