Rewriting the Story of My Parents’ Marriage

How old footage of my family helped me see my mother through a new lens

My family at Seabright Beach in Santa Cruz, California, in 1959. I’m on the far right. Photo courtesy of Patsy Fergusson

We’d had the big white box of old 8mm and Super 8mm family movies for 40 years, handing it off from sister to sister after Mom died of breast cancer in 1975, each one of us promising to digitize or otherwise take care of these precious family heirlooms. No one had.