Charlie Crim opened a box he’d never seen before. Inside were photographs, film reels and videotapes his parents had saved, quietly documenting their lives long before he realized how much they had recorded. There were trips taken before he was born, moments from retirement, everyday scenes that once felt ordinary and now felt rare. At the Johnson County Genealogical Society’s Memory Lab at Central Resource Library, those memories began to move again, frame by frame, sound and motion returning after decades of silence.
Family photographs, home movies and fragile documents passed down through generations preserve voices, faces and moments that shaped families and communities. But time wears them down. Film fades, tape degrades and paper becomes brittle. The Memory Lab helps ensure those stories aren’t lost.
A partnership between Johnson County Library and the Genealogical Society, the lab offers free access to equipment that lets patrons digitize photos, slides, documents, VHS tapes and 8 mm film. It launched in April 2023 as a 50th anniversary project, with equipment funded by the Johnson County Library Foundation. The Library provides space, and the Genealogical Society trains volunteers to staff the lab.
Few similar labs exist nearby. Aside from the Midwest Genealogy Center in Independence, the Memory Lab is one of the only resources of its kind in the region. Demand was immediate. Appointments filled months in advance as families rushed to preserve aging materials. From January through November 2025, the lab served 1,166 patrons, up from 781 in 2024, and helped convert more than 410,000 digital files.
For Crim, the experience was both technical and personal. “The volunteers were very helpful in getting me to understand the equipment, the printers, the scanners and everything they had there,” he said. “The Library facility itself is really efficient. There’s plenty of space to spread things out.”
As he digitized his parents’ materials, the scope of their documentation became clear. “I didn’t understand how much the photography and filming my parents had done,” Crim said. “They documented all the trips they took, from before I was born to after they retired.”
Now, Crim and his oldest son are organizing everything in the cloud, sharing videos through a private YouTube channel and photos and documents through shared folders. Relatives have already begun asking for copies.
The Memory Lab offers a practical and personal way to preserve the stories that matter most. To learn more or book an appointment, visit jocolibrary.org/genealogy or jcgsks.org.
