Katie Ward Tolchin’s whole life was in those boxes of photos. Katie’s mother had diligently collected and organized the family’s photos for decades, starting long before Katie was born in 1982. In 2017, fire destroyed the Brazoria County home of Katie’s parents, Emily and Lee Ward. Their family photo collection was damaged by smoke and deteriorating quickly.
Katie contacted Doorstep Digital to help her save her mother’s photos. Jack Perry, the founder and owner of Doorstep Digital, drove to Brazoria County to meet with Emily. Katie said Jack had excellent rapport with her mother. Jack listened to Emily explain her well-planned system of organizing all her precious photos. “We wouldn’t have done it with anyone else,” Katie said, and explained that her mother had a bad experience with mailing photo materials in the past. With Doorstep Digital, all materials were personally collected and returned to the Ward family.
In the summer of 2022, Doorstep Digital scanned and organized more than 10,000 photos for the Ward family. Photos were in printed, slide, and negative formats. All files were named and organized to mimic Emily Ward’s established system. The entire collection of photos fit onto one 1-terabyte hard drive. Doorstep Digital delivered two copies of that hard drive to the Wards. Now they can access all their pictures with any computer, and those digital files will never fade from the smoke of 2017.