Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

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.

 

Giving MyHeritage photo tools a spin

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There are so many amazing options for online research. Some, like FamilySearch and Chronicling America, are free. Others are fee-based. I’ve subscribed to Ancestry for a dozen years or more and always feel like it’s a worthwhile investment. More recently, I’ve started subscribing to Newspapers.com and just reupped. (I love newspaper research.)

But it was not until recently that I subscribed to MyHeritage. I was actually given a subscription to MyHeritage by the company gratis. They approached me about doing a Facebook Live presentation and about partnering with them for a week-long special promotion to my readers. (That promotion will be going out on Friday–if you’re not already on my mailing list, I encourage you to subscribe so you’ll get the offer in your inbox). When they asked me to partner with them, I requested free access so I could try it out before recommending it to my readers.

So I’ve been using MyHeritage a bit–not a ton because I haven’t had a lot of time for researching in the past couple of months. But I love that they have rich databases (16.9 billion records!) and also some pretty spectacular photo tools.

To test those out, I uploaded a couple of photos from my hard drive.

First, here’s a sepia-toned photo of my second great grandmother, Jennie Nebergall Wheeler (1857-1933) taken in 1917. I uploaded it to MyHeritage and used the Colorize, Repair and Enhance tools to improve the photo. The results are pretty remarkable, in my opinion.

I now feel like I can look into Jennie’s eyes and imagine a conversation with her, something that never felt possible with the old photo.

Here’s another example. This is the William Reese Rasco family in 1907. This photo graced the mantle at my aunt’s house for many years. My aunt recently moved and gave this photo to me. I consider it one of my treasured possessions. The baby in the photo is my maternal grandmother, Beatrix Rasco Adams (1907-1987).

This one feels a little different to me. It might be because I’m so familiar with the photo and the fact that the original photo is black and white (rather than sepia), but the improvement doesn’t feel quite as dramatic. It is fun to see what color my great great grandmother’s scarf might have been, though!

I downloaded the improved photos to on my hard drive and am storing them with the originals with the word Enhanced added to the end of the file name. I can’t wait to upload more photos. Since these two photos are portraits, improving them didn’t add a whole lot of information. But I know from watching Photo Detective Maureen Taylor’s Facebook Live for MyHeritage that these enhancements can bring out clues in photos that aren’t easily seen in the originals.

Another photo feature that MyHeritage has introduced is animation. You upload a still photo and they will animate the individual or individuals in the photo. Here’s an example, using the photo of my great grandmother Jennie.

 

And here’s my great aunt Lessie Rasco, from the portrait above.

I’m a bit on the fence about the utility of this one. But it is pretty fun and I imagine it might make sharing the photos a little more interesting for non-genealogy-focused relatives

Have you used these photo tools? What do you think?

Again, if you’re on my mailing list, you’ll receive an email from me on Friday with a special link for a really great discount on a MyHeritage subscription (for new MyHeritage subscribers only.) Full disclosure: they will share the revenue from your subscription with me. If you aren’t on the list, you can sign up here or in the form that pops up when you scroll to the bottom of this page. When you sign up for the mailing list, you’ll also get a short series of daily emails from me, along with a end-of-the-month email with links to the previous month’s blog posts. You can unsubscribe at any time.