Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Are old photos hiding from you?

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I just spent a really rewarding nine days in my hometown of Walla Walla, Washington. I helped my 91-year-old father, Gene Adams, move into a lovely assisted living place. He’s really happy there and I’m feeling so good that he’s content and safe.

As part of my time in Walla Walla, I emptied his condominium so we could put it on the market. He and my mother bought the condo in 1991 and while my dad wasn’t a big accumulator of stuff (thank goodness), there was a basement storage room that I had not spent much time in. When it came time to empty the storage room, I discovered box upon box of old family photos and other ephemera. (One of the photos was the one of my brothers and me taken in about 1965 that’s at the top of this post.)

I was simultaneously thrilled and disappointed to find these photos. Thrilled because I can’t wait to carefully go through them. Disappointed because I would have loved to have gone through them with my mother when she was alive. She died in 2015 at 82 from Parkinson’s disease and in her last years wasn’t very mobile. We could have had a lovely time talking about and organizing these photos together.

So that leads me to a question for you: Are there family photos tucked out of sight in your home or in the homes of your relatives? Could you uncover them and enjoy them with your family members? It might be worthwhile to think about who you might ask and, of course, what you might do with them.

In addition to the boxes that were in my dad’s condo’s storage room, I also went through boxes of photos and documents that had come from my aunt’s home. When she moved into a care facility in February, I had these boxes delivered to my father’s condo to go through later. “Later” came very quickly! There are some treasures there as well. (And there were a lot of papers that she didn’t need to keep that added to my task. I blogged about that on my organizing blog yesterday.)

In all, I had seven boxes shipped to my home from Walla Walla. They should arrive at the end of the week. I would be lying if I told you I wasn’t overwhelmed at the prospect of how I’m going to deal with them. My plan right now is to use Stacy Julian’s How to BEGIN with the Box methodology to get started. I’m so grateful to have that starting point.

Keep an eye out for more posts as I go through this stuff! I’m sure it will be an organizing challenge that perhaps we can all benefit from.

Free access to all of Newspapers.com this weekend!

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In honor of Mother’s Day, Newspapers.com is offering free access to their premium collection through May 9.

I happily pay for a Newspapers.com Publishers Extra subscription because I find so much great information there. But if you’re not a subscriber, I encourage you to give it a whirl for free this weekend. I suggest you check the available newspapers (you can search by state) and make a list of the family members you can search on in various localities before you start.

It’s great to see what kind of news your ancestors may have made. And, of course, finding obituaries can be a treasure trove of information. (Just remember to a grain of salt!)

Personally, I have found lots of little articles about my family members that individually can feel kind of tedious to process but collectively can paint a nice picture. (I find it’s worth the time to download and add the information to my database.) And every now and then I find something more juicy, like an article about my grandfather’s uncle being arrested for assault for beating up a citizen who voted against his father in an election for county judge. (That’s an image of that article from the 4 Nov 1909 edition of the Messenger-Inquirer of Owensboro, Kentucky at the top of this post.)

If you have some time on your hands this weekend, you might enjoy exploring Newspapers.com at no cost. And you might find it helpful to check out my blog post, How I Process Newspaper.com articles.

Before you get started, I encourage you to come up with some research questions. That will help you use you research time well. It’s so easy to fall down a rabbit hole with newspaper research!

Quick Tip #35: Have a place for your unprocessed digital files

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Here’s the next in my occasional series of bite-size Quick Tips. Click on the Quick Tips tag for my other Quick Tips. Because I tend to write longer posts, I wanted to provide a quick-to-read (and quick-to-write) post every couple of weeks on a small topic that pops into my head. This one helps me keep an eye on the work I need to do.

Have a place for your unprocessed digital files

If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, you know I refer to my backlog all the time. When I talk about my backlog, I’m talking about the documents that I have downloaded and renamed, but not extracted information to add to my Reunion database. My backlog doesn’t stress me out (too much) because I know exactly how large it is and I know where all the documents are.

In my case, I download all my documents to my Surnames folder. It is only after they’re processed that they’re moved into an individual ancestor’s folder. Thus any unfiled documents (which will always float at the top above the subfolders because they start with a year) are easily visible. This is a sanity saver for me. I would hate the idea that I’d lost track of any unprocessed documents.

Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash

Watch The Imperfect Genealogist on Zoom on May 14

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In what seems to be turning into an annual thing, I’ll be presenting my talk The Imperfect Genealogist again on Zoom. This time it’s for the Henderson County (Kentucky) Public Library. It’ll be at 9:30 to 10:30 am central time on Saturday, May 14. The talk is free and open to the public. You can register at the library’s website.

My talk kicks off a day of talks, the other three by eminent genealogist and speaker Mark Lowe, a specialist in Kentucky and Tennessee research. The latter two of Mark’s talks are Kentucky focused, but his first talk, Is Your Family Tree Broken? applies to all. It will be at 11 a.m. If you look at the library’s calendar, you’ll see links to each of his talks. It appears that separate registration is required for each.

I love talking about perfectionism. In this talk, I’ll be talking about ways perfectionism can get in the way of enjoyable and productive genealogy research, looking at some areas in genealogy where, in my opinion, good enough is (and isn’t) good enough. I’ll also be discussing some strategies for letting go of perfectionism. My co-host Shannon Wilkinson and I just published the 200th episode of our weekly podcast, Getting to Good Enough, which is all about letting go of perfectionism so you can do more of what you love. You can see that it’s a topic that we never have trouble finding new perspectives on!

I hope you’ll consider watching me on Zoom!

P.S. Don’t miss out! The special half-price offer from MyHeritage for Organize Your Family History readers expires tomorrow.

 

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When you first join the list, I’ll send you a few emails to help you organize your family history. After that you’ll hear from me at the end of every month when I send an email with links to that month’s posts. And every now and then, I’ll let you know when I have something special to promote.