Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

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.

MyHeritage offering free photo colorization

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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

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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!