Images and footage of weddings, holidays and pieces of Santa Barbara history are being preserved thanks to the Santa Barbara community archives project that digitizes film rolls belonging to local families. 

The project, initiated by the UCSB Library and Santa Barbara County Genealogical Society, has already led to the digitization and preservation of 4,000 feet of film spanning from the 1940s to the 1980s from 23 local families.

Thanks to the project, Camryn Foss got to see footage of her grandparents, Santa Barbara High School sweethearts, getting married. She also saw images of her dad as a toddler. 

“It’s been amazing to just show my family members that were in the film pictures of them when they were little, and seeing my dad at 2 years old, and my grandparents when they were in high school,” Foss said. 

Foss got to see some of the films when they were shown to Santa Barbara County Genealogical Society members on Nov. 15 as part of this community archiving project.

Foss found a shoe box containing 82 rolls of film taken by her great-grandfather, Gates Foss, spanning from the 1940s to the1970s. Her family used to have a projector to watch the films, but she says it broke about ten years ago, leaving them without a way to revisit their home videos.

“One of the things that makes me most happy is seeing the look on all my family’s faces,” Foss said. “Watching that, and then my great aunt and uncle recall stories and tell me stories that go along with the film was also just quite an amazing thing to happen. It’s really cool.”

It took six months for the films to be digitalized, and Foss said the project has even inspired her to become a historian and work on historical preservation. 

Laura Jean Treat Liebhaber, curator and co-founder of the Santa Barbara community archives project, said the goal is to get new perspective on Santa Barbara’s past. 

“The primary goal is to preserve and share local family stories, so home movies, photographs, anything that documents daily life in Santa Barbara County,” Liebhaber said. “But the bigger goal is to bring in new voices and perspectives to our local history collections.”

Liebhaber is a curator for film and television and Santa Barbara local history collections at UCSB’s Special Research Collections.

Going through the films, Liebhaber said they got to observe what moments families wanted to capture, from weddings, birthdays, holidays, and just toddlers playing with family pets. 

They also found some things they didn’t expect to see, such as engineers for Delco Systems Operations, now known as Del Aerospace, testing lunar rovers in Goleta. 

While the films showed people, pets, streets, styles and businesses that are long gone, it also showed that many things in Santa Barbara are still the same, from annual community parades, anti-war protests, surfing, family parties, and a love for the outdoors.

“We just have some stories of people who haven’t seen these films since the 40s or 50s, and haven’t seen or heard their grandfather speak in years, that’s been the most moving thing,” said Jessica Law, associate director of development at UCSB library who works on the project.

Some of the films donated showed residents surfing at Rincon Beach, and Law said she hopes the films can help with local environmental research.

“We can use these films to see how Santa Barbara has changed,” Law said. “Whether that’s culturally, or through the ocean. There’s a lot of history there that we can use, other than just home movies, there’s more of a complex history.”

Since the project launched in 2022, Liebhaber said they’ve partnered with numerous local museums and libraries to hold events where residents could bring in old film rolls. To participate, it needed to be motion picture film in good condition created by a current or previous resident of the area, and that the subject of the content was in Santa Barbara County. 

Participants got a digital copy of their home films for free.

The main challenge the Santa Barbara community archives project team came across was getting films that were too damaged, or that films were vague and unlabeled, leaving the team with little context about the content and creation. 

Going forward some of the films will be posted on UCSB’s Library website, and Liebhaber said they will be working closely with participants to get more information about their families and the films.