Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Downsizing when you’re the family historian

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I was so delighted to see in my email this week that my friend, Amy Johnson Crow, is promoting the podcast episode she and I recorded back in the fall of 2019, Downsizing and Family History.

When I spoke to her in 2019 I didn’t have any personal experience with dealing with inherited family history items. I always viewed my parents as non-collectors and figured when the time came I wouldn’t be faced with too many challenges. But I’ve gained some experience now and there were plenty of challenges. In March, my father’s older sister moved into skilled nursing and I sold her home for her. (I’m her Power of Attorney.) I requested that any family-history related items be taken to my father’s condo for me to go through later. Then in May, I moved my father into assisted living and faced down going through his stuff and my aunt’s stuff in the same week so I could get his condo on the market. He passed away August 20, only three months after moving, and I needed to clear out his assisted-living apartment in a matter of a few days.

I tried to practice what I preach and get in touch with what’s important to me about these documents and photos. I tried to evaluate their potential value for future historians. I offered a bunch of stuff to my brothers (one took stuff, the other didn’t). And I shipped some boxes to myself.

I have sorted through the seven boxes I shipped in May but am still processing those documents and photos. I am anticipating a shipment today of stuff from my father’s apartment. I’ll spend some time in the coming week going through those items and figuring how/where to store them. I know that Stacy Julian’s method, How to BEGIN with the BOX, will be very helpful again.

As the family historian for my family, I feel a lot of responsibility for these items. But I’m going to use my expertise as a professional organizer to try to save those items that are the most valuable from a genealogy standpoint. My perspective, as I shared on Amy’s podcast, is that the more I keep of any one category of item, the less special any of it is. But I also know that now isn’t the best time to make decisions with lasting repercussions. So I will probably save more than I might otherwise for later consideration.

If you’ve been through this, I’d be very interested in hearing about your approach!

 

What to do with original documents after scanning

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I do most of my research online, so this hasn’t come up a lot. But this week I’m going through documents that had lived in my parents’ home and my aunt’s home and some of them are original vital records. I did my first group of ten a couple of days ago and scanned and processed them. And then I had to decide what to do with the originals.

This morning I went through the little stack one by one and followed my gut about those I wanted to file into the paper files I have left over from before I processed everything digitally and those I would feel comfortable discarding.

In truth, I could discard any of them, since I’ve captured the images. But my gut tells me to hang on to those documents that have original writing or signatures. An example is my parents’ marriage certificate, shown above. They were married by father’s uncle and I think he filled out the form. I don’t have a good, logical reason for this decision. It just feels right because these documents feel special. I have the space in my file cart and the files are already created, so it will be a simple matter to file them. If I have to create a new file folder label and put it on a folder to file something, I might feel like more trouble than it’s worth.

This is a matter of personal preference and I understand that my preferences might change. (And you may have a completely different preference.) If I end up with a lot more and it feels too laborious, I may revisit this criterion!

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.

 

 

At Thanksgiving, we can create history for our descendants

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I originally wrote this post five years ago, and I like repeating it on Thanksgiving where we might once again be getting together for a meal with our loved ones. Happy Thanksgiving to all my readers!

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.

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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.