Kodak invented 16mm film in 1922 and this gave American consumers a brand possibility to capture their memories in a way that allowed them to replay them again and again for generations to come. Many of us have video tapes of ourselves from the 1980s, through the 2000s. Prior to that, we captured our memories on film and if stored correctly over time, we still get to relive the memories of our grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on.
Scope of Collection
This collection consists of 16mm films that were originally shot by George Elliott Morrison (1897-1938), the owner of the Cedarshore Hotel in Sayville, New York. These home movies and amateur films date from 1927 to 1932 and capture the Morrison family, friends, the Cedershore Hotel, and its guests.
The films found here were sourced from a VHS tape that was made by Webb Nash Morrison (1926-2022) in 1989 and donated to the library in 2001. The tape was digitized through the Sayville Library’s partnership with LILRC’s Accessing Archives Project in 2025. It should also be noted that, in the future, these video files will be replaced once the library digitizes the entire film collection. The collection dates from 1926 to 1955 and includes other locations in New York such as Brooklyn, West Point, Geneseo, Niagara Falls, and New York Harbor.
This collection was uploaded to New York Heritage through the Sayville Library’s partnership with LILRC’s Accessing Archives Program in 2025.
