Mining Memories to Preserve the Past

Her memory is creaky, Dwania Kyles insisted, and most of the photographs that help unlock it are stored in her computer. But recently, sitting in a warren of rooms in Harlem as the light outside faded, she had a rush of recollections about her family and the night that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did not come to dinner.

Ms. Kyles and Thomas Allen Harris, a documentary filmmaker, had donned white gloves to thumb through photographs of her parents in high school. “My parents left the promised land to jump into the lion’s den,” she said of their move from Chicago to Memphis to join the civil rights movement. On the evening in 1968 that King was expected at their home for soul food, her father, the Rev. Samuel B. Kyles, ended up with him on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, where King was felled by an assassin.

Mr. Harris and Ms. Kyles, a 55-year-old wellness consultant and songwriter who lives in Harlem, were in his office ferreting out information for the filmmaker’s Digital Diaspora Family Reunion project. Since 2009, Mr. Harris has traveled the country collecting photographs and stories from families, then putting those and filmed interviews onto his Web site....