Grampa stays connected

Every few weeks, Ray Tansy Jr. turns out another Gramp-a-Gram and posts it on YouTube. He’s one example of the millions of people who have developed a digital connection with distant family members. To make that connection, Tansy turned to YouTube, a popular video Web site that perhaps is best-known for its college-humor bits of zaniness.

Tansy, who’s 62 and the administrator of Spokane County’s emergency medical services office, produces short videos on his home PC to give his distant grandchildren a better sense of his personality.

He uploads the videos to the YouTube server and then e-mails the link.

Like many grandparents, Tansy and his wife, Debbie, used to send digital pictures by e-mail to their two grown children, Ryan, who lives in Redmond, Wash., and Kacie Strom, in Virginia Beach, Va.

But Tansy, a naturally funny performer and a bit of a jokester, knew that his four distant grandchildren would prefer to look at videos.

“I do this so the grandkids know who we are,” said Tansy, whose YouTube family videos can be found by searching for his tag name, “Gramp-a-Grams.”

His children and his grandkids now wait for the next installment. The videos, which basically involve no production at all, reflect his personality completely, said Ryan Tansy, who lives in Redmond with his wife, Leah, and their twin 3-year-old daughters, Madison and Grace.

“The kids love watching them,” said Ryan. “I almost have to pull them away from the computer.”

Kacie Strom, the daughter who has two young sons in Virginia, has the same reaction.

“The videos are just like him, kind of goofy,” she said from her home, where she lives with her husband, Dave Strom, stationed with the U.S. Navy at Virginia Beach.

Tansy is kind of a folksy Spokane version of a classic granddad type. He’s got bushy eyebrows, an aging hippie’s mane of graying hair and a readiness to act silly near any camera.

One of his YouTube videos is called “Gramp-a-Gram Grampa Disappears.” Shot with just a digital Nikon point-and-shoot camera, Tansy sits at his South Hill kitchen table, reading from the evening TV lineup. His wife says, “Hey grandpa, what are you doing?”

“Gee, there’s a show about a magician who makes himself disappear,” he replies.

A second later in the video, Tansy’s voice can be heard but no one is seated at the table. “Hey grandpa, where did you go?” Debbie Tansy asks.

“What do you mean? I’m right here.”

A few seconds later, Tansy is back at the table acting like nothing unusual has happened.

“Well kids, enjoy the show. Goodbye,” he says.

In a video he shot and uploaded before Halloween, Tansy lifts several bags of candy toward the camera and says, “Watch your mailbox, kids. Something might be coming.”

Kacie Strom says her two sons will watch the videos over and over.

“My son Connor has gone around ever since telling people, ‘Watch your mailbox,’ ” Kacie Strom says.

Tansy at first shot the videos with his camera, transferred them to the computer and added them as attachments to e-mail. But the large files often clogged the inboxes of his relatives.

So he experimented on the Web and discovered YouTube. One of its major advantages, he said, is its simplicity.

“I signed up, got an account and tried uploading a video. It was totally easy,” Tansy says.

Now that he’s got all three families clicking on YouTube, Tansy has one more technology upgrade in mind. For Christmas, he has sent his grandchildren PC Webcams as gifts and bought a third one for himself.

He will continue making and posting videos on YouTube. But the next stage for the digital Tansys will be real-time Web-cam performances of “Gramp-a-Grams,” followed by live audience feedback from both ends of the country.