Right after I was born, my father bought an 8mm movie camera. I never knew if his primary motivation for the purchase was for his work as a gastroenterologist at Emory or to record his idyllic family lifestyle out in what we then called “the country” and now call “Sandy Springs.”

Certainly, viewing the movies provided no answer to the question. Halfway through a film of my sisters going off to a prom or my brothers opening up Christmas presents, the image suddenly would switch to a tightly cropped shot of the esophagus or stomach lining of one of his patients. In 1966, Raquel Welch starred in the movie “Fantastic Voyage,” about a medical team that was shrunk and inserted inside a patient’s body. My friends were fascinated, but I felt like I had already seen it.

When I was 10 and 11, I would host “movie nights” for my family, setting up a theater in our basement and playing the old newsreels. Eventually, the films were tossed in an old box in my dad’s tool room, left there to languish for a couple of decades.

One night, near the end of his life, Dad walked into my brother Jack’s house for dinner, shoved the box toward him and said, “Here, you’ll know what to do with these.” And he did.

This past Christmas, Jack gave each of us a videotape.

The films had been edited and enhanced with two new dimensions. He had the images set to appropriate music – ranging from the wistful sounds of “Titanic” and “Gone with the Wind” to ’50s and ’60s rock ’n’ roll classics – and provided a modest level of voice-over introductions.

During the holidays, I watched the film with my two teenage children, who are somewhat disconnected from my side of the family because they now live in Charlotte, N.C., with my ex-wife. I usually struggle to find activities on our weekends that will interest all three of us. But they were transfixed. Somewhere between the then-rare color footage of my parents’ 1939 wedding, the scenes of me carrying cats and footballs as a toddler and awkward moments of my sisters greeting their dates, my kids grasped a better understanding of who are all these people who gather at our overwhelmingly large family parties.

Most amazing to us all was the life we lived in the ridges overlooking the Chattahoochee River in the 1950s. Dad spent hours each week driving the children to school and then going to work at Emory University. He loved the long commute down Riverside Drive and Johnson’s Ferry – seeing only one or two houses before he got to Roswell Road. As the family grew older, he reluctantly agreed to move us back into Buckhead. But we all knew how much he loved his little Eden, now covered with modern homes in a development called North Harbor in Sandy Springs.

Watching the videotape, the kids were getting antsy as it wound on through beach trips, traditional Thanksgiving Day walks and the introductions of my brothers’ wives, but a little treasure awaited them at the end. Before he had put the movie camera up on a shelf for the last time, Dad arranged for the recording of one last scene.

My children and I watched as Dad lifted a glass of champagne and offered a welcoming kiss to a woman who would become my wife – and a few years later, their mother. They fell silent, but I could tell that Dad’s decades-long filmmaking hobby had, in just a couple of seconds, recorded a moment that will help them feel a part of a family, no matter how distant we may seem.

Photo: My father, Jack Spalding Schroder, with my son, Thomas Spalding Schroder

I have a relatively large family in Atlanta. We’re now working on our sixth generation of cousins since my great-grandfather moved here from Kentucky with his bride in 1882 to open a law practice. We get together often at parties, weddings and – lately it seems – a lot of funerals. A few weeks ago, we attended the funeral of my uncle, Hughes Spalding Schroder. It turned out to be a rather remarkable experience.

We go to funerals to honor the person who has left us and to show support to the immediate family in their time of grief. But it helps us mark the milestones in life with a bit of ceremony and tradition. And sometimes, such as at Uncle Hughes’ funeral, we come away with an unexpected source of inspiration.

Hughes was, above all, a gracious gentleman. He died a day or two short of his 76th birthday. We thought perhaps he was holding on for that. But that would have been too self-centered a goal for him. Instead, Hughes had been waiting to celebrate his 51st wedding anniversary with his wife, Frances. Their youngest daughter, Mary, marveled at how they continued to flirt with each other until the end. How Hughes would light up whenever Frances entered the room. When Hughes reached that celebrated anniversary, he honored his family and his bride by telling them how much he loved them and then he moved on.

It wasn’t until he died that his friends, co-workers and relatives gathered around each other to swap stories and realized a fantastic fact about the man: there went a rare soul who never said a bad word about anyone. Thinking back about conversations with Hughes, we realized he had always kept the focus on the person with whom he was talking, asking questions about our work, our family or our interests. He would only talk about himself if asked, and then only briefly. Soon he would steer the conversation back towards others. When asked by the funeral home if they wanted a story in the Atlanta newspapers, his family said no, that it wasn’t his style to draw attention to himself.

As one person after another tried to sum up Hughes’ life into a few words, they all came individually to the same observation. Frances confirmed it after thinking of all of their time together: “I never heard him say a bad word about anyone in 51 years!”. It takes a remarkable level of selflessness and self-confidence to remain true to such a graceful goal. And not to wonder if anyone would ever notice the effort you spent over a lifetime.

But that, really, is the most sincere gift of all. To give to others without expecting recognition for it. To find joy in the giving itself. For many of us who will scurry about this month, buying and wrapping presents for others in hopes they will appreciate the effort we went through to get it, it would be akin to delivering the presents without a card saying whom they were from. It would be as if we never told our kids there wasn’t a Santa. In fact, when I was a child and began to piece together a theory that there might not be a Santa, my father asked if I wanted to talk with Santa on the phone to allay my concerns. Years later, I found out who he had called: Hughes.

So, in the end, Hughes did not know if we ever noticed. May he rest assured we did. And took inspiration from not only the joy he gave each of us in hundreds of small conversations over the years, but in his remarkable challenge to us all to speak well of others – always. Why shouldn’t we do the same? And give to others what he gave to us: a gift of a lifetime.