Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Check out Stacy Julian’s How to BEGIN with the Box

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Back in April, I wrote an enthusiastic blog post about my favorite RootsTech 2020 presentation, Do Something with That Box from Stacy Julian. She kindly gave me permission to reprint her helpful handout because she hadn’t written about it on her own website.

I was delighted to see that last month she published a robust blog post on the topic that fleshes out what I wrote about. It’s called How to BEGIN with the Box and I urge you to check it out, even if you’ve read my post. It provides great detail and it includes the downloadable pdf of the handout, along with photos and explanations.

When I drove to Walla Walla in September, I took the opportunity to bring home a box of family stuff. It’s not so much documents as photos, but I intend to use Stacy’s framework as I go through it. (The box been sitting unopened for almost six weeks now…I think our stay-at-home holiday time will be a good time to address it.)

If you have a box of family memorabilia to go through, do yourself a favor and check out her terrific post. You can thank me (well, really, Stacy) later.

Stacy Julian reopening her 20in20 online course (for a good cause)

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I became a huge fan of Stacy Julian when I heard her speak at RootsTech. After RootsTech, I shared details of her talk Do Something with that Box! here and I referenced it in my own talk, The Imperfect Genealogist.

Stacy is all about helping people tell stories, particularly family stories. I’m on her mailing list and I received an email this week that she is her reopening her yearlong online course, 20in20. Here’s a short video about the course.

In a nutshell, participants will create 20 projects over the course of a year. It was originally intended to take place in the calendar year 2020. Enrollment closed months ago. But that changed this week. Stacy wrote in her email:

“As I have contemplated current events—especially those that have exposed racial inequality in the United States—I have made the decision to reopen 20in20 and donate ALL of the proceeds to organizations and efforts making a difference for people of color.”

I was very impressed by this and I asked her if I could share the information here. Here’s another great piece of news. The price has been cut in half–to $60–to encourage enrollment. See the 20in20 page on Stacy’s website for where and how she’s donating the proceeds and to sign up.

This strikes me as an amazing opportunity to create some wonderful projects, with the help of an amazing teacher, at a big discount and to do good at the same time. I just had to share.

Help your kids know your heirlooms’ stories

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A reader of this blog, Jacqueline Krieps Schattner, sent me a link to a post she wrote recently on her genealogy blog, Seeds to Tree, that described the decluttering she’s been doing during the pandemic (she’s used her time very well!). The blog post also presented an idea that I think is absolutely genius, so I asked her permission to write about it here (and also on the Peace of Mind Organizing blog).

Jacquie’s decluttering work during the pandemic has been very thorough. She got so much done that she turned her attention to an area that’s usually last on the list: the family treasures around her home. In her post, Pandemic De-Cluttering and a Heirloom Book, Jacquie described taking stock of some of the treasures she has collected over 40 years of marriage (and inherited from her parents and grandparents). She’s still enjoying them and has no interest in letting them go. But when she started thinking about what will happen to these heirlooms if she and her husband were to downsize or were not around to explain the significance of each piece, she came up with an important piece of wisdom:

Heirlooms without stories are just stuff.

Jacquie came up with a great idea for making sure her daughters would know the stories of the individual items. She created a book with photos of each of the heirlooms, complete with captions that capture all the stories. That way, when the time comes, her daughters will be able to make informed decisions about which of these heirlooms they would like to keep. She titled the book, Why Did We Save This?

Jacquie spells out in detail how she went about creating the book (via Shutterfly), what it looks like, and what she’s done with the copies. This is such a helpful idea that I’m thrilled to share it! Thanks for allowing me to write about it, Jacquie!

Favorite RootsTech session: Do Something with that Box!

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Stacy Julian

I heard a lot of great sessions at RootsTech this year. But the one that really blew me away–because of the quality of its content and presentation–was Stacy Julian’s Do Something with that Box! Stacy is a blogger and podcaster and superstar in the scrapbooking world. You can learn more about her at www.stacyjulian.com.

“That box” that Stacy refers to is the box of family history papers, photos, ephemera and (sometimes) junk that so many of us have been given. It’s so easy to be overwhelmed by that box, isn’t it? In her talk, Stacy took us step by step through her methodology to make the stuff inside that box accessible “so that when you want to find something you can and when you have time to take action you know what to do.” As a professional organizer, this made my heart sing.

One of the things I loved about her approach is that it makes the process of dealing with a box of family-history stuff less overwhelming. Stacy has you sort everything into one of five broad categories, then go through each category and assess the value of each item. You’ll be discarding lots of stuff during this process, undoubtedly. Stacy makes the point that scarcity creates value–if you are discerning about what you keep, your family members are more likely to look at and enjoy the items.

After sorting and assessing you’ll assign an action to each item that requires one (digitize, transcribe, share, etc), using a sticky note. The final step is to file the stuff into a file box using the same broad categories you started with. As you go through the documents, you’ll put those that excited you into an Action folder. Once you have ten items in the Action folder, you take action.  An optional step in the process is to create a timeline, as you go, for each generation of the family represented by the box.

The system gets you to a “good enough” place where your stuff is easily accessed–by you or other family members–without expending a huge amount of effort. And when you have an itch to take action, you’ll know just what to do. Genius.

Stacy was kind enough to give me permission to make the handout that she gave to RootsTech participants available to you. At the bottom of this post are images of each of the five pages. Click on each to see a larger version.

The handout is great because it gives you the bones of her fantastic method. Hearing her speak about it was even better–there were videos included in her presentation and her energetic style was so enjoyable (and effective).

I have some great news: Stacy is developing an online course on this topic! So you’ll be able to get all the great content those of us in her RootsTech audience experienced (and probably more). I’ll be sure and post when that’s available.

In the meantime, take a look at this handout and see whether you might be able to take some steps to tackle one of your boxes while you’ve got extra time at home.

Edited to add: I was delighted to discover that Stacy has now written a robust blog post on this topic! Check out How to BEGIN with the BOX on her website.