Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Let’s create history for our descendants this Thanksgiving

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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.

Review of the Epson FastFoto FF-680W photo scanner

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Earlier this year, I was offered the loan of an Epson FastFoto FF-680W photo scanner to try out and blog about. The offer coincided nicely with the discovery, while I was cleaning out a seldom-used closet of a cache of photos from the 1980s and 1990s, documenting my 20s and 30s. I am not a photo album person–I’ve created probably two albums in my life. But I knew that storing these photos in photo boxes (some organized, some not) meant that I wasn’t looking at them. So I liked the idea of scanning them.

To be honest, I was thinking of my organizing blog, not this one, when I decided to accept the offer of the loan of the scanner. So last month I posted my review there. (Spoiler alert: I liked the scanner!) But it just occurred to me that readers of this blog, who certainly have photos to deal with, might also be interested in the review. So I’m basically reposting it here.

I scanned hundreds of photos with this handy little scanner. It’s a sheet-fed scanner (like a fax machine), so it handles prints only. The photos I was scanning were relatively new and were not fragile, so I had no hesitation to put them in the sheet feeder. Based on my experience, though, I think I’d be comfortable putting old photos in the sheet feeder, as long as they weren’t crumbly or torn. The scanner does come with a carrier sheet for more delicate photos, though I didn’t try it.

The scanner has software that allows for easy organization of the digital photos, assuming you’ve already taken the time to organize the prints. As I explained in a post on my organizing blog, I went through my photos and grouped them into categories that made sense to me. The software is set up so that you can assign a year (or a decade), a month (or a season), and a description to each batch. The description becomes the folder name and the year, month and description, followed by a number become the file names for each photo in the batch, which are numbered sequentially.

Here’s a photo of the screen where you make those selections:

It’s quite simple. If you finish a batch and later find photos that belong in that folder, it’s easy to just make the same selections and they’ll be added to the folder.

If I were scanning photos of ancestors–particularly if it wasn’t a large volume–I might bypass the built-in naming method provided by the scanner software and instead name them individually use the file-naming protocol (Date Type of Document-Ancestor Name-Locality) that I use for my genealogy documents.

For my snapshots in this scanning project, once I got past the idea that I needed to name every photo (again, see my previous post on my organizing blog), the process went quickly. The scanner is well named. It’s really fast!

Here’s a 20-second video I took of the scanning, start to finish, of a batch of 32 pictures. It’s really that easy and fast. I scanned at 300 dpi (the fastest setting) but I could have scanned at 600 or even 1200 dpi in JPEGor TIFF formats. I was impressed with the number of options available. Obviously, if I’d scanner at a higher resolution it would have been slower.

I was scanning snapshots at 300 dpi, so it’s a bit hard to evaluate the quality of the scanned photos. I did use the auto enhancement setting so that I would get a duplicate, enhanced version of any photos that started out sub-standard. These photos were color corrected and red eye was eliminated. Pretty cool.

I choose to store my photos on my hard drive, but the software allows you to upload your photos to Dropbox or Google drive with a click. There’s also a sharing button for easy sharing via Facebook or email. I chose to store the folders in my folder structure on my Mac, but there is an option for saving it to the Photos app.

At $529, this isn’t a scanner for the casual or infrequent user. But if you have a lot of photos to scan, it might be something to consider. It’s fast, easy to use and virtually trouble free.

The Epson FastFoto scanner made a project I’d been putting off really easy. I had no trouble organizing my prints—I broke that project into little pieces and really enjoyed looking at a the photos—but I had really dragged my feet doing the scanning. That’s a shame, because it turned out to be a breeze!

Even “paperless” genealogists should keep some records

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If you’re a regular reader, you know I’ve embraced the idea of minimizing paper in my genealogical research. I never print out the documents I find online. Instead, I download them, immediately rename the file according to my file-naming protocol and, once I’ve gleaned all the information I can from the document and created a source citation, I file it within my folder structure. My blog post called How I process a downloaded document takes you step-by-step through my digital workflow. And there’s lots more information in the Paperless Genealogy Guide, the 44-page downloadable guide that Brooks Duncan of DocumentSnap and I wrote as we prepared to speak on that topic at RootsTech in 2017.

As someone who espouses letting go of paper, I’m often asked if there are papers that those who are trying to minimize should keep. I usually reply by saying that documents that are impossible or difficult to replace–even if they’re scanned–are worth hanging on to. That means, for instance, there’s no need to hang on to census records but original birth certificates are worth keeping in a file or binder.

I recently came across a post on the Abundant Genealogy blog from Melissa Barker, The Archive Lady, on this very topic. (Melissa was the subject of my How They Do It Interview in August 2017.) Her Abundant Genealogy post, called 5 Genealogical Records You Should Never Throw Away, goes into some detail about five types of records that you should hang onto. It’s definitely worth reading. (Spoiler alert: The five types of records are original records, diaries and journals, scrapbooks, old letters and photographs. Read the blog post to find out why.)

I would have a hard time throwing away hand-written letters and, in fact, though I carefully scanned it, I still have the epic 36-page letter my grandfather my wrote my grandmother right before they got married, in which he confessed the family secrets. That will be passed along to my niece or nephew or, perhaps, a cousin. But will I keep all old photographs once I’ve scanned them? I’m not so sure.

What about you? Are there are any records you would add to the list of keepers? Any that you don’t think belong there?

On Thanksgiving, we’re creating history for our descendants

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Two years ago, I wrote this Thanksgiving post. I ran it again last year and now I’ve decided to make it an annual tradition. Enjoy!

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.