I appreciate you! If you love history, be it your personal history, history in general or a combination of the two, and are taking steps to preserve it, I totally appreciate you! If you’re doing everything you can to gather, preserve, protect, restore and share your family photographs, I really appreciate you! If you’re helping others to preserve their histories by sharing, teaching and advising, I truly appreciate you! If you give of your time and resources to help those who are in a bind, right now, and have to use their money to protect their future instead of preserving their past, I salute you -  you are among the shining stars in my universe, and I just wanted to let you know how much I appreciate you! It’s you who I emulate, who I want to be like when I grow up, if that ever happens, who I strive to be like, now.

As some of you know, I tend to ‘give away’ a lot. Some might even call me gullible, but I don’t see it that way! If someone asks for some pointers that I can turn into a tutorial, and I can restore their photo fairly quickly, then why not just do it for them? It’s helping me out, too, by giving me tutorial fodder, right? If a client suddenly loses their job and the work has already started, and isn’t all that difficult, why not just finish and give it to them? I mean, seriously! Have you ever lost your job? It might just be that little something that makes them feel better, like not everything is a hopeless mess! If there’s someone on a fixed income that can’t afford to have the special photograph restored, it’s not going to kill me to give a major discount, or, what the heck, just do it for them for free! Ever since we started our business, volunteerism and helping people out have been a part, a large part, of our mission statement. We’ve volunteered with Operation Photo Rescue to restore photos damaged in natural disasters, with Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness to help people with a question, document or photo they might not have easy access to, with helping Medical Examiners identify Unclaimed Persons and with the photo restoration needs of various historical societies, among our other, unorganized efforts. We’ve loved every minute and derived satisfaction from these projects you just can’t get any other way! In fact, we love it so much, the whole dynamic of our business has shifted…

We’re now doing far more unpaid work than the paid variety. This is a wonderful, amazing, awesome thing! Except when the bills are coming due. Or the hard drive where I keep all my work is failing, or I have to do all repairs in the house and yard but can’t afford the time…Helping is starting to hurt, and that’s the last thing we want to happen! But something has to give, so we’ve decided to try something that, hopefully, will benefit all.

We’re calling it the Appreciation Project. How it works is we keep on doing what we’re doing, helping people out with photo restoration, and instead of saying “ok, I’ll restore your photo and use it in a tutorial and you pay me $100 or $75 or $200″, if you love how your photo restoration turns out, you help us out however you can. Yes, there is a donate button if you’re able to help out that way, but if not, then “pay” us by helping out some other way! I can always use help re-doing my web site! I have a gate falling down! Live in Fort Worth? Love to dig weeds? I’m the restoration artist for you! Tell all your friends about us! We’ll send some business cards for you to pass out! Is there someone else you can help out the way we’ve helped you? That would be incredible! This isn’t the Honor System, exactly, more the Appreciation System! Please help us continue to be able to help others by helping us out! If you can, we’d really appreciate it!

Send your inquiries and photos to me at janine (at) landailyn (dot) com, or holler at me on Twitter (@landailyn) or Facebook ! I’d love to be able to help you out!

Tags: Cool People, Genealogy, Good Stuff, Photo Restoration, Photographs, Preservation, Research, Restoration, Wishes