Feb 1, 2018 By Harry Funk staff Writer hfunk@thealmanac.Net 5 min read

Stashed somewhere in a closet or cupboard, you might have what Peters Township resident Lisa Webster calls The Scary Box.

It’s stuffed with the likes of negatives, slides, VHS tapes and Super 8 film reels. And it’s scary because you don’t want to pitch it, but you have no idea what to do with it.

“These are the things that are so precious, and these are the things that we’re not enjoying, that we need to get digitized,” Webster said.

The same goes for snapshots stuffed into boxes and drawers, alongside postcards and letters you’ve received over the years, and various other odds and ends that you hope to pass along to your children, grandchildren and beyond.

As Webster often attests, all of that can vanish in a hurry.

“When I was in my older teens, we had a house flood, and my family lost everything. I can still see my mom crying and peeling photos apart and trying to salvage things,” she said. “There’s a little bit that has been salvaged, but the majority of it is gone.”

Webster made it her mission to help others avoid similar calamities when she founded Grand Scale Video Productions, which provides services to organize and safeguard memories that have been captured on various media. Her passion for preservation also has led her to join the sales team of Forever, a Pittsburgh company that is taking an innovative approach to digital storage.

As one of the 5,600 Forever ambassadors in the United States, Canada, Australia and United Kingdom, Webster presents information about the company’s high-tech undertakings in a not-so-technical manner.

“What we do is a little bit complicated, the whole concept that it’s forever and the whole concept that it’s guaranteed,” Glen Meakem, founder and chief executive officer, explained.

The guarantee is that whatever a customer stores with Forever will be secured for that person’s lifetime plus 100 years, essentially making the material available for future generations.

Meakem, a U.S. Army veteran of the First Gulf War and Harvard Business School graduate, had achieved considerable success with his software firm FreeMarkets Inc. and then Meakem Becker Venture Capital before deciding to pursue a new avenue in 2012.

“I was doing some organizing of my family memories, photos and documents and also some videos. Over the years, I’ve done videotaped interviews of various older relatives,” he recalled. “I thought, OK, I have to store these in the cloud. Otherwise, they’re eventually going to get lost.”

But he found no services that offered the type of storage he sought.

“All these players, big and small, they all say the same thing: We’re temporary. When you upload to us, we own your stuff, so we have intellectual property rights. Because we have intellectual property rights and we own your stuff, we can data mine it,” he said about statistical analysis that can assist in targeted advertising. “And we can delete whenever we want.”

And so he started Forever with the customer at the forefront and a guarantee backed by what essentially is an endowment fund, providing a continual source of financial resources well into the future.

“I think there are millions of us who care about history, who care about the stories and the history of our families,” Meakem said, and that applies collectively to our society: “What I think modern historians are very interested in is, what was it like to live in the Roman Empire in 100 A.D.? What was it like to live under the Ming Dynasty in China? It’s not just about the rulers. It’s about what life was like.

“So I think that the preservation on a mass scale of all of these detailed personal family memories is really, really important.”

Along with permanent storage, Forever offers other services to customers.

“If they’re going to keep their photos in one place, they want all the great organizational tools, which we have,” Meakem explained. “They want to be able to tag and tell their stories. They want to be able to create photo books and add digital art and have world-class quality printing. They want to be able to print on acid-free paper that’s going to last 200 years.”

For Webster, her objective is to help people be able to enjoy the mementos they’ve collected over the years.

“I don’t want them just sitting on a computer,” she said. “I want you to be able to find those memories that you’re looking for, maybe put them into an album. Maybe make something very special with them, but to bring them out of the closets, to bring them out of the basements they’ve been sitting in.”

And that includes The Scary Box.

For more information, visit www.forever.com.