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Your pictures, yellowing with age, slosh around haphazardly in a shoebox. Your papers, or what's left after the family dog got them, are wrinkled and tattered.

Still, your relatives are jealous because you have the only copies of these heirlooms, and the burden therefore has fallen to you to be sure those snippets of history aren't lost forever.

The Shupes can help. They're one family ready to help other families. Armed with basic computer hardware and accessories -- plus a software program the Shupes developed -- anyone can preserve their family histories by cramming tons of photos and text and even video clips onto CDs. Copies can be made quickly and inexpensively.

The Shupes did their first family history CD last year, never thinking at the time that it would blossom into a business.

"Most of the people ordering from us are people who have all these photos or they're in the computer and they've not overcome that obstacle of how to make it easy to access for my relatives," said Loretta Shupe, mother of Jefferson Shupe and wife of Jon Shupe, who developed the Family History CD.

"But when you're done, if you've collected photos from all these relatives, now you've got them on one CD, and it's very easy to hand them out to the relatives so you all have the same photo album."

The North Ogden family is offering the program via a Web site, www.familyhistorycd.com, for about $45. They hope to soon have it available in retail outlets because it brings together elements Jefferson Shupe could not find when he began working on a family project that started it all last year.

"The whole thing came about because we couldn't find anything on the market that did exactly what we wanted," said Jefferson, a programmer, as is his father. "We thought, 'Why don't we make it ourselves?' "

The program can be downloaded from the Web site or sent via CD from the company. Details are available at 1-801-786-2114. For use with PCs but not Macintoshes -- system requirements are listed on the Web site -- the program allows people to take scanned photos or text, organize them and copy them onto CDs.

"It's designed for somebody about my level to use," said Loretta Shupe, not a novice but no expert either. "You can either start your project or open one you've already been doing.

"The hard part is getting your data into your computer. Once it's in your computer, it's so easy to convert."

The program allows for simple and quick creation of customized home pages. But one feature the Shupes are proud of is Face Labels. The archivist can set up the CD so that when a user puts the pointer over a face in a photo, the person's name or other information pops up.

Users can place any information on the CD onto their hard drives or crop and print photos. Loretta Shupe joked that it's so fun to use, it can easily produce insomnia.

The program offers advantages both technical and sentimental. Information and photos are easily accessible, the digital format prevents degradation of images and the CDs are, by their name, compact -- much more so than a book or box or shelf of family albums containing the same stuff.

On the nontechnical side, the program offers a way for more than one person to have the photos, text or even video clips at the ready. Burning copies of the CDs is but a few keyboard clicks away. No more asking a cousin if you can look at that rare shot of grandma taken in 1909. No more risk of losing those types of images forever due to fire or water damage. Loretta Shupe even suggests putting a copy with the 72-hour survival kit.

"It seems like we hit the nail right on the head," Jefferson Shupe, 24, said. "There are other software programs that go off in different directions, but it seems like we've hit the mainstream of what people would like.

"We're pleased with what we have. It's really fun to watch others get excited when we demonstrate the program and watch their faces light up as they realize all the possibilities it opens up for them."

What eventually opened up for the Shupes as a business opportunity began as a simple project to put Loretta Shupes' parents' life histories onto CDs to share with relatives. Each copy contains the contents of a printed-book version that includes more than 1,000 photos.

"All we were trying to do was make it possible for our relatives to have this," Loretta Shupe said. "I thought this was priceless when we got it done."

Later, the Shupes put together another set of CDs, each containing a history of the 150-year-old North Ogden First Ward of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

A Deseret News story about the first CD foray yielded e-mails from around the world. Noting strong interest, the family decided to turn their work into a commercial activity.

"People loved what we did and wanted to do it on their own," Jefferson Shupe said. "We thought we would like to help people, and we were excited about the technology. We thought it was a great thing we had done, and we wanted to share it with people."

Sherry Smith of Taylorsville has done some testing on the program and now has 600 images "and many more to go" as she works on getting CDs ready to distribute at a family reunion in June. About 250 will be attending.

"It's great. People in genealogy are mass collectors and often not very good organizers. We'll have a museum in our home but it won't make sense to anybody else. We know it, but our children don't know names or what it's all about," she said.

"Especially when you get old-time pictures and gather them, you can put the Face Labels on them and put information with the photos. Then they say, 'Oh, that's what she was talking about.' "

The CDs represent a safe and economical way to preserve and share photos, she said.

"I get calls every week, but now, with the master database, I burn them another CD and say, 'This is my collection. Enjoy.' It's my way to share with a large number of people."

It has proven so popular that relatives are bombarding her with photos to add to the database. "Some of these are images I've never seen in my life, and they've seen some they've never seen in their lives," she said.

Paul Bandley, also of Taylorsville, lauds the Shupes for the organizational aspects of their program. A family history book he put together four years ago proved too expensive to reproduce for many folks. He prepared a CD to present at a family reunion two years ago, "but it wasn't very professional" because organization was lacking.

Armed with the Family History CD, he's got about 200 CD copies ready for distribution at an August family get-together.

"When I prepared the CD two years ago, I wanted everybody to have a copy -- even the grandkids," he said. "Even if they're not that interested, I wanted the information in their hands. That's the way I feel about it. You could spend years collecting all this information, but it doesn't do any good unless it goes out to the family and would serve as a reference for them forever."

Bandley believes the younger generation will be more apt to get involved in family history through the CDs "because it's a high-tech way of doing things."

Loretta Shupe loves how the program can bring history to life, but she noted that the history need not be the old-time variety. Example: a trip to Hawaii by Jefferson.

"It can be very contemporary. It's not just for archives, but for now," she said.

"And we took a cruise last February and my sister-in-law said, 'Well, I want a copy of all your pictures.' And I was tempted to take that disk down to Wal-Mart and get them all printed, but then I'd have to write on them all to explain them. But I thought, 'You know, I'll make a CD and mail them to her.' "

A Saturday family get-together served as another example. A few shots on a digital camera and a little time on the computer yielded a virtually instant record for participants.

"In an hour's time, we had a CD to send home with them, which to me is cheaper than getting these all printed and mailing them out to everybody," Loretta Shupe said. "A CD, you can buy for 50 cents to a dollar each."

E-MAIL: bwallace@desnews.com