Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Help your kids know your heirlooms’ stories

By 7 Comments

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!

By 8 Comments

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.

MyHeritage offering free photo colorization

By 11 Comments

When I was at RootsTech, MyHeritage had a booth where they were colorizing old black-and-white photos for people. The booth was always swamped with people. I wasn’t one of the people who stood in line for this service because the whole idea of colorizing old photos just didn’t sit right with me. I couldn’t put my finger on my objection, exactly. But I’m curious what readers of this blog think.

Today, I thought I’d blog about it, so decided to upload a couple of photos to try it out for a spin.

At left (at the top of this post) is a photo of my 2nd great grandparents, Samuel Vorce Wheeler (1852-1937) and Elizabeth Jane (Jennie) Nebergall Wheeler (1857-1933), taken in 1926 on the occasion of their 50th wedding anniversary. MyHeritage allows you to see your colorized and original photos side by side in one photo. You can move the dividing line back and forth and watch the photo change. That happens at the MyHeritage website–for the purposes of this post I took a screenshot. The photos you download (like those below) do not have the divider.

Here’s a photo of the Arthur Brown-Rhoda Wheeler family. (Rhoda is the daughter of Samuel and Jennie.) That’s my grandfather, Crawford Brown (1906-1996), on the far left with the dark striped shirt. I think the photo was taken around 1916. The top photo is the original that I uploaded. (I took a photo of the print with my phone, transferred it to my computer, and uploaded it.) Beneath is the colorized version.

I have to admit I find the colorized version more eye-catching. But it doesn’t feel like a 1916 photo, does it?

It’s incredibly simple to upload the photo to the MyHeritage site (just drag and drop). The colorizing takes seconds. There’s no charge. With a click, you can download the colorized version and/or a comparison photo that contains both images.

It’s amazing, but I’m still not sure quite what to think about it. I do know that I’m not going to include the colorized versions among my genealogy documents–they’re purely for fun.

Have you tried it? What are your thoughts?

Let’s create history for our descendants this Thanksgiving

By 2 Comments

Once again, here’s my annual Thanksgiving post, originally written three years ago. I wish all my readers a wonderful Thanksgiving!

This Thanksgiving week, I’ve been thinking about how the ordinary lives of my ancestors are endlessly fascinating to me. As I slowly plow through my great great grandfather’s Civil War pension file, I get very excited when I come to a form he filled out 125 years ago that has a little extra information in it (like the names and birth dates of his children). Any peek into what his life was like is a special treat.

It got me thinking about how mundane aspects of our lives today might be really interesting 100 years from now to the people below us on the family tree.

Of course, we fill out fewer paper forms now. And genealogy will probably look very different in the twenty-second century. But I think photos and records will always be valuable.

This year, as we celebrate Thanksgiving (or really just go about our lives), we have the opportunity to create history for our descendants. We can be mindful of our legacy as we’re taking pictures. We can take care to label them (or add metadata to digital photos) so future generations know who the people in the photos are. We can do oral history interviews and carefully preserve them with labels for future generations.

If you have older relatives around your Thanksgiving table, I urge you to ask questions and preserve those conversations for generations to come (as well as for your own genealogy research). I sure wish I had. Wouldn’t it be great to put your hands on a recorded interview with one of your ancestors? You could be the person making that possible for your descendants.

Thanks to smartphone technology, it’s so easy for us to record conversations and take videos. Let’s do that while we can and mindfully tag and back up those recordings. (And hope that the medium will still be readable decades from now.)

As much as I urge my organizing clients to part with paper or other items that don’t serve any purpose any longer, I do sometimes encourage them to hang on to documents or photographs that might be of interest to their descendants. I encourage you to be mindful of that and store those items that so that they might be passed on to family-history-minded descendants when you pass.

Remember: Every day we have the opportunity to create history.

Photo by Robert and Pat Rogers via Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.