Restoring Memories: Mishawaka family finds hope in old home videos discovered after fire

MISHAWAKA, Ind. -- A Michiana family is trying to repaint the past while searching for a new normal after a fire last winter destroyed their home and the memories inside. Baby books, family documents, and photo albums were reduced to ash. But while digging through the debris, they discovered something still hanging on: a pile of old home videotapes. With the help of a local business, those videos were brought back to life.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how much is a video?

"Well, for some people, it’s a lot," said John Rutowicz, a digital transfer administrator at Gene’s Camera in South Bend. "To be able to hear people. To be able to hear and see, remember people’s mannerisms, their tone, their inflection, and just what they look like. It’s really an important part of aiding memory, especially as we get older."

You could say Rutowicz is an expert at preserving memories, helping give new life to old home videos.

"Most people don’t have functioning tape players anymore, and a lot of their tapes have been sitting in closets, unable to be watched," said Rutowicz. "Then, all of a sudden, a decade or more goes by, and they can digitize them and watch them again."

"We're singing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in a very '90s bathtub," laughed Mare Nickelson as she watched an old home video that her mother, Kim Krueger, had recorded in the mid-90s.

Nickelson and Krueger never thought they'd be able to watch their old memories again after a fire last winter destroyed their Mishawaka home.

"It was January 20," said Nickelson. "It was like the Polar Vortex Day we had."

"It was one of the coldest days of the year," said Krueger. "By the time we understood the scope of what was happening, we kind of just fled."

"It was so sudden, I didn’t even think of putting on shoes," said Nickelson. "That was the worst hour of my life."

The house was gone, and so was everything inside.

"It was catastrophic," said Krueger. "It's not just that we lost our home or our things; to some degree, you feel like you never existed."

"When you lose everything from the first 30 years of your life, if there's even a chance, if there's even a hope, if there's even a sliver that there could be something here to remind me that I had a childhood, you want to pursue that," said Nickelson.

"I mean we were literally shoveling ash hoping to find a remnant of anything," said Krueger.

As they continued to dig, the family discovered a stack of old home video tapes under a pile of ash.

"Obviously they're in terrible condition, but we had them," said Nickelson.

Six plastic cases. Each one partially melted, each one with spools of stories inside.

"Really badly damaged," said Rutowicz. "Heat is going to be just really destructive to tape. I didn’t think we were going to get anything from it, but they did get quite a lot of it."

Rutowicz said Gene's Camera had just started partnering with a family-owned company in Pennsylvania, Tailor-Made Film & Video Transfers.

The tapes were VHS-C’s, a compact version of the VHS tape. Donna Wolk, owner of Tailor-Made Film & Video Transfers, said restoring them took a combination of time, determination, and a gentle touch.

"I mean, those tapes were like melted together," said Wolk. "They couldn't take the screws out of them because the screws were melted. So, they had to bust those tapes open and clean them out."

Wolk said this specific project took a full day to complete. "I mean, they have to do that by hand," she said. "Cleaning it all out because it was full of soot and trying to salvage what was salvageable."

Technicians worked painstakingly, going through the footage frame by frame, physically cutting out damaged sections, and putting the good pieces back together. They hand-wound the recovered footage onto a new hub, which was placed inside a new shell—so the memories could finally be played back and saved digitally.

"Amazed," said Krueger. "Amazed at what was on there. Then it's like, 'Oh my God, I remember shooting that. Oh, I remember that moment.' And to know that—I mean, the intended purpose was to capture that moment in time forever. And to know that it was literally saved from the ashes and we still have it."

Tailor-Made Film & Video Transfers was able to recover three and a half hours of video—three and a half hours of memories.

"To me, it feels like they're worth a thousand lifetimes, because you have to start your entire life over," said Nickelson. "So, when you have a reference point of where you came from, it helps in the rebuilding process."

Almost a year has passed since the fire.

"It doesn't even feel like the same place," said Nickelson, looking over the construction of their new home.

But the soil is the same.

"These tapes—it’s like, there’s proof that I existed before the fire. Because it does change you," said Nickelson.

The old footage is now helping Nickelson and Krueger build a new future.