Ashleigh Vaillancourt Seegar thought she had already seen everything that remained of her father.

Then, on his birthday, a distant relative sent her a Facebook message. The relative had been digitizing old tapes and found three clips of James Vaillancourt, who had died in 2000 at age 27.

Ashleigh opened one.

There was no birthday party or family milestone on the screen. James was simply walking into a Hair Cuttery at the Norfolk military base where he had been stationed, joking around for the camera.

Ashleigh had been 6 when her father died. Her two brothers were even younger and no longer remember him at all. Twenty-five years later, an ordinary recording gave all three siblings something photographs couldn’t: the sound of their father’s voice and laugh, and the way he moved when he wasn’t posing for a family picture.

The Camera Caught the Parts Photos Couldn’t

Ashleigh recognized the Hair Cuttery immediately.

What held her attention, though, was James himself. He was being goofy, playing to the camera and showing the kind of personality other people had described to her for years.

“Well, it was interesting seeing his personality, right?” Ashleigh told PEOPLE, which first reported her story.

Growing up, she had heard that her father was social, funny and often the center of the room. People described him as a jokester and the “life of the party.” Her own memories existed in pieces because she had been so young when he died.

Now she could watch those descriptions become a person.

Even more striking was how familiar his behavior looked.

“Seeing those same personality traits or quirks… it just reminded me of my brothers and me,” Ashleigh said.

The siblings could see themselves in the way James joked with friends and performed for whoever was holding the camera.

Ashleigh sent the footage to the family group chat, then shared it with her mother and grandmother so each person could watch it privately.

Her brothers had no memories to compare it with. Still, the sound of James’s voice and laugh landed immediately.

“We all just kind of watched it on our own,” Ashleigh said.

At 6, She Couldn’t Understand What Her Mother Had Lost

Pressing play also changed the way Ashleigh saw the year her father died.

As a child, she understood the loss from the position of a daughter. Now she is a mother herself, and one of her daughters has reached the same age Ashleigh was when James died.

“My daughter is the same age now that I was when he died,” she said.

That comparison shifted her attention toward her mother, who had suddenly been left to raise three young children.

“I went through like a spiral, I won’t lie,” Ashleigh told PEOPLE.

She cried when she first saw the video. Watching James walking, talking and joking made him young again in a way that old family stories couldn’t.

It also made his age harder to ignore.

James had been only 27.

Ashleigh said the footage made her think about “how all the dominoes have fallen throughout the years.” At the same time, seeing him again gave her something she hadn’t expected from an old tape.

“I think it did also heal something in me,” she said.

One Ordinary Clip Changed What She Records Now

The video didn’t show James doing anything that someone in 2000 might have thought worth preserving.

He was going for a haircut.

That was exactly why it mattered.

The camera caught his mannerisms without the formality of a major occasion. His children could hear his natural laugh, see him joke and recognize pieces of their own personalities in a father they had lost before they were old enough to know him as adults.

For Ashleigh, that changed the purpose of taking family videos.

She now makes a point of recording herself and her husband, rather than keeping the camera aimed only at their children. She wants her daughters to have footage of their parents being ordinary people together.

The thought is tied to something Ashleigh and her brothers can now say about their own lives.

All three have outlived their father.

James died one month after his 27th birthday, leaving three children behind. The children who once knew him only through a limited collection of pictures, stories and old recordings have now lived beyond the age he ever reached.

That gives the Hair Cuttery clip a different weight.

What may once have looked disposable now contains a version of James his children hadn’t been able to recover anywhere else.

Twenty-Five Years Later, He Still Walks Into the Frame

Ashleigh says her family doesn’t talk about James often.

Her grandmother still finds his death painful, and James had no siblings who could keep telling his stories. Over time, the family also lost contact with many of his friends.

The tape changes at least one part of that.

Ashleigh’s daughters can now watch their grandfather alive on screen. Her brothers can hear a father they don’t remember. Ashleigh can look at a young man joking for a camera and understand him from the other side of parenthood.

She told the relatives who found the tapes how much the gift meant to her.

“I’m very appreciative to them,” she said.

Ashleigh has also begun thinking about what her own daughters might someday find in the videos she is making now. They won’t contain only childhood performances, school events and carefully filmed milestones.

Their mother and father will be in the frame too.

“Here we are, 25 years later… and here he lives in this video,” Ashleigh said of James.

For now, he is still there: 27 years old, walking toward a haircut, joking with the person behind the camera.