Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Registration for RootsTech 2020 is open!

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Registration has opened for RootsTech 2020, to be held in Salt Lake City February 26 to 29! As I mentioned, I will be speaking at this conference. Right now, my talk, The Imperfect Genealogist, is scheduled for Friday afternoon, February 28, but that’s subject to change. (You can see the current schedule here.) In a communication to speakers, we learned that 600 people signed up within the first few hours of registration opening on Wednesday. That bodes well for a well-attended conference as usual!

You can purchase a RootsTech pass for all four days ($169), or a one-day pass for a particular day ($99). And, if you’re feeling flush, you can also purchase an Ultimate Experience Pass (for $799) that gives you reserved seating, and behind-the-scenes opportunities, including a main stage rehearsal opportunity. You can check out this comparison chart of the various pass options.

RootsTech also offers Family Discovery Day on Saturday, February 29, for members of the LDS church. It’s free, but registration is required.

If you know you’ll attend, I urge you to register now (the early bird pricing above ends until October 11) and book a hotel room at the same time. The RootsTech block of rooms at the conference hotels are already selling out. You might consider booking a hotel room even if you’re still on the fence, since you can cancel it later if you decide not to attend. But be sure and make a note of it. Last year, I didn’t attend RootsTech, but I did book a hotel room months before–and promptly forgot. Imagine how shocked I was when I received an email suggesting I could check in for my Salt Lake City room online just a couple of days before the conference. Thankfully, I was able to cancel without penalty.

In addition to the the over 300 breakout sessions and daily general sessions with keynote speakers, RootsTech also features a giant Expo Hall where you can see the latest and greatest products and services for genealogists and talk with representatives from those companies. The conference is sponsored by Family Search, which typically has a huge booth staffed by their personnel to help you learn to take full of advantage of Family Search. Exhibitors also offer talks in the Expo Hall.

If you need more convincing, check out 10 Reasons to Attend RootsTech. And here’s an 11th reason. If you go, you can meet me! If you decide to attend, please let me know in the comments, if you haven’t already in a previous post, and we’ll arrange to meet up.

New genealogy TV show

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NBC is debuting a new genealogy TV show called A New Leaf, hosted by Daisy Fuentes. (Remember her from MTV back in the day?) Two things about it seem particularly interesting to me:

Personally, I don’t watch live TV (I stream it) but I love that it’s a Saturday-morning show because I’m thinking it might draw young people into the genealogy fold.

The show, which is sponsored by Ancestry, will debut on October 5. It is part of NBC’s Saturday morning “The More You Know” block of programming. I plan to stream it on Hulu, my streaming service of choice. (I pay extra for advertising-free Hulu and it’s fantastic!)

According to the show’s Facebook page, “Each week, A New Leaf will teach viewers the importance of appreciating and understanding their family history in order to make important decisions to enact positive changes in their lives.” That sounds promising!

Review of the Epson FastFoto FF-680W photo scanner

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Earlier this year, I was offered the loan of an Epson FastFoto FF-680W photo scanner to try out and blog about. The offer coincided nicely with the discovery, while I was cleaning out a seldom-used closet of a cache of photos from the 1980s and 1990s, documenting my 20s and 30s. I am not a photo album person–I’ve created probably two albums in my life. But I knew that storing these photos in photo boxes (some organized, some not) meant that I wasn’t looking at them. So I liked the idea of scanning them.

To be honest, I was thinking of my organizing blog, not this one, when I decided to accept the offer of the loan of the scanner. So last month I posted my review there. (Spoiler alert: I liked the scanner!) But it just occurred to me that readers of this blog, who certainly have photos to deal with, might also be interested in the review. So I’m basically reposting it here.

I scanned hundreds of photos with this handy little scanner. It’s a sheet-fed scanner (like a fax machine), so it handles prints only. The photos I was scanning were relatively new and were not fragile, so I had no hesitation to put them in the sheet feeder. Based on my experience, though, I think I’d be comfortable putting old photos in the sheet feeder, as long as they weren’t crumbly or torn. The scanner does come with a carrier sheet for more delicate photos, though I didn’t try it.

The scanner has software that allows for easy organization of the digital photos, assuming you’ve already taken the time to organize the prints. As I explained in a post on my organizing blog, I went through my photos and grouped them into categories that made sense to me. The software is set up so that you can assign a year (or a decade), a month (or a season), and a description to each batch. The description becomes the folder name and the year, month and description, followed by a number become the file names for each photo in the batch, which are numbered sequentially.

Here’s a photo of the screen where you make those selections:

It’s quite simple. If you finish a batch and later find photos that belong in that folder, it’s easy to just make the same selections and they’ll be added to the folder.

If I were scanning photos of ancestors–particularly if it wasn’t a large volume–I might bypass the built-in naming method provided by the scanner software and instead name them individually use the file-naming protocol (Date Type of Document-Ancestor Name-Locality) that I use for my genealogy documents.

For my snapshots in this scanning project, once I got past the idea that I needed to name every photo (again, see my previous post on my organizing blog), the process went quickly. The scanner is well named. It’s really fast!

Here’s a 20-second video I took of the scanning, start to finish, of a batch of 32 pictures. It’s really that easy and fast. I scanned at 300 dpi (the fastest setting) but I could have scanned at 600 or even 1200 dpi in JPEGor TIFF formats. I was impressed with the number of options available. Obviously, if I’d scanner at a higher resolution it would have been slower.

I was scanning snapshots at 300 dpi, so it’s a bit hard to evaluate the quality of the scanned photos. I did use the auto enhancement setting so that I would get a duplicate, enhanced version of any photos that started out sub-standard. These photos were color corrected and red eye was eliminated. Pretty cool.

I choose to store my photos on my hard drive, but the software allows you to upload your photos to Dropbox or Google drive with a click. There’s also a sharing button for easy sharing via Facebook or email. I chose to store the folders in my folder structure on my Mac, but there is an option for saving it to the Photos app.

At $529, this isn’t a scanner for the casual or infrequent user. But if you have a lot of photos to scan, it might be something to consider. It’s fast, easy to use and virtually trouble free.

The Epson FastFoto scanner made a project I’d been putting off really easy. I had no trouble organizing my prints—I broke that project into little pieces and really enjoyed looking at a the photos—but I had really dragged my feet doing the scanning. That’s a shame, because it turned out to be a breeze!

August 30 x 30 wrap up

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It’s the end of another 30-day challenge. About 30 of you signed on in the comments and maybe others took it on without commenting. How’d it go?

These challenges are so valuable for me because they elevate genealogy research on my priority list. Some months, I’m able to do 30 minutes of research all 30 days. Other months, I’m not so lucky. Unfortunately, this was one of the latter months. I did pretty well the first half of the month. But the second half of the month went cattywampus for me because of a perfect storm of injury (I tripped on the sidewalk in front of the post office and scraped myself up pretty well) + oral surgery + one outrageously busy week leading organizing teams that, unfortunately, immediately followed the oral surgery. This last week of the month, though, has been much more calm and comfortable and I have researched every day, except Tuesday. On Tuesday, I just plain forgot.

I’m still processing all the documents/photos from my June Kentucky research trip. But little by little, I’m getting through them. I think I’m going to have another 30 x 30 challenge in October because I’ll certainly need one.

So with my true confessions over, it’s now your turn. How’d the month go? Did you get in as much research/organization as you hoped? Was the challenge helpful? Please let everyone know in the comments!