Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

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!

How They Do It: Nathan Dylan Goodwin

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I am delighted to publish this How They Do It interview with novelist and genealogist Nathan Dylan Goodwin. I love Nathan’s genealogical crime mysteries books starring his protagonist Morton Farrier, a forensic genealogist. (If you haven’t read them and you enjoy reading fiction, you’re in for a treat.) Nathan has been doing genealogy research since he was quite young and I was very interested to hear how he organizes his research. Nathan lives in Kent, England (which you’ll notice in some of his responses).

Author Nathan Dylan GoodwinHow They Do It: Nathan Dylan Goodwin

How long have you been doing genealogy?

I started doing genealogy when I was twelve years old…I say started, but what I actually mean is spent an inordinate amount of time creating family trees and not really knowing what I was doing! I did have the presence of mind, though, to interview (on a basic level) several elderly relatives, including my great grandfather’s sister, who was born in 1895. At the wake after her funeral, I gathered up all of her unwanted photographs, which had been destined for the dustbin. It was around 1998 when my research became more serious and I began going to record offices, buying certificates, etc.

What’s your favorite thing about being a genealogist?

First of all, I love the puzzle-solving element of finding out about my relatives and discovering things about their lives, which nobody else knows. My second favourite thing is making contact with living relatives, something which has been really important to me since I started in genealogy. I’ve met so many wonderful distant cousins from all around the world and very often they are in possession of photos and documents, which I would never have come across from record offices or genealogy websites. One of my prized possessions is a family bible belonging to my great-, great-, great-grandparents, which was given to me by a 3rd cousin, about whom I knew nothing prior to tracing the siblings of my great-, great-grandparents down to living relatives. Seeing my interest, she very generously gave me the bible.

What’s your biggest challenge when it comes to organizing your genealogy?

Organising it! I’ve been the family genealogist for a long time now and so frequently get passed various family documents, which invariably need preserving as they are and also in some digital form, which can be shared with other interested family members. This process, as genealogists are aware, can be very time-consuming. So, I’m ashamed to admit that I have a lot of semi-sorted box files pertaining to each family name that I am researching.

What is your favorite technology tool for genealogy?

I’m a huge fan of anything DNA-related and am delighted with the development and release of analysis tools on Ancestry, GEDmatch and MyHeritage. My current favourite, though, is probably the tools available on the DNA Painter website. I’m very often using the ‘What are the Odds?’ tool, as well as Blaine Bettinger’s Shared cM tool. Love it!

If you were starting out new as a genealogist what would you do differently?

Had it been available at the time, I would have DNA-tested everyone in the family! I’m lucky to have my mum and maternal grandmother tested, but don’t have much on my paternal side. Other than that, I would ask far better questions of my elderly relatives. When I started out, I would ask questions about family members – names, birth dates, children, etc. – information I can now find within a few seconds online. I should have asked what life was like for them growing up, the personalities of their families, what pastimes they enjoyed, and any other questions, which cannot be found in other sources.

Do you keep a research log? If so, what format?

I do keep a written journal when I begin a complex genealogy problem, such as helping an adoptee find their biological family; something I have done several times, now. Owing to the complexities of such a challenge, it is easy to overlook something or forget areas of research which have been already explored. I usually note the date, what research I undertook and any next steps I need to take.

How do you go about sharing your personal research with cousins or other interested parties?

The main way in which I share my research is via my (private) Ancestry tree. I find this isn’t too overwhelming and is easily navigated. The line of my family, which I started working on at the age of twelve, was my grandmother’s maiden name, Dengate, and since 2002 I have maintained a website, www.dengates.com dedicated to the family name. It is also my one-name study. The website is currently undergoing a major overhaul, but once up and running it’s a great way to share information, stories, videos and photographs. Having the website also encourages others to share their information with me and other interested parties.

What’s the most important thing you do to prepare for a research trip?

Before any research trip, I always make sure the records that I want to see are actually going to be available to me and pre-order them, if I can, to save time. I have an on-going Notes file on my mobile phone and so add document references to it until I’ve built up a big enough list for a particular repository to justify a visit.

What’s your biggest piece of advice to genealogists in terms of organizing their research?

Nathan Dylan Goodwin in front of his writing spaceI think everyone organises their research differently, so my advice would be to choose a way, which means that you can access something at a later date when you’ve built up a lot of material. Personally, I have (per family surname) a file for birth, marriage and death certificates (in chronological order), a file for wills, several for photographs, one for correspondence and one for artefacts. I must admit that my photographs files are slightly haphazard and need organising in a better way!

Do you have a dedicated space in your home for doing genealogy research? What’s it like?

I have a cabin at the bottom of my garden, which I use predominantly for writing my genealogical crime mystery stories, but I do also undertake some genealogy down there, too. Otherwise, I’m sat at the dining-room table on my laptop!

A cabin at the bottom of a garden sounds like a delightful place to write and do research! You can read a short prequel to Nathan’s genealogical crime series at his website, www.nathandylangoodwin.com and the whole series can be purchased at Amazon and other retailers. Thank you, Nathan, for this peek at how you organize your research!