Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

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.

Going through my box of inherited items: step two

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In August, I blogged about taking the first step to process a box of inherited items. I’m using the process I learned from Stacy Julian in her terrific RootsTech talk last year (you can read all about it in her blog post How to BEGIN with the BOX). Her process allows you get started on something that can feel very overwhelming.

I promised that when I took step two, I would post about it.

According to Stacy’s methodology, step two (after sorting the contents of the box into categories in step one) is to go through the items in a category and assess the value of each item, then note the needed actions. Here’s the secret sauce of the whole thing: You put the items that you most want to take action on–the most interesting or thrilling or beneficial finds–and put them in an Action file. And you’re allowed to have no more than 10 items in the Action file. Once you have that many items, you stop the assessment process and take action.

I want to take a moment to say how brilliant I think that is. Since you put the best stuff in the Action file and limit the number you can put there, then the Action file pretty much only contains stuff you really want to do. And there’s a built-in trigger (10 items) to get started taking action. Stacy says in her blog post that you should follow your heart and intuition in terms of deciding what goes into the Action file.

So in my efforts, I immediately gravitated to the Written Stuff file, as opposed to the Picture Stuff. That’s just my nature. I found a 50th anniversary card (pictured at the top of this post) from my mother’s brother with a snarky inscription that was so typical of my Uncle Joe. You can click on the image to see it larger, but I’ll tell you that the inscription says, “So you made it to 50 years!! Gene, I admire your tenacity. Happy anniv. Love, Joe”. I scanned the card and sent it to his kids.

Among the Written Stuff were some old newspaper clippings that were fun, though of little genealogical value, including one that shows the new jackets of the Yakima (Washington) High School basketball team circa 1949, with basketball players, including my father, Gene Adams (who is 91!), modeling them. I decided to scan the clipping and email it to my brother (who is a big fan of sports uniforms) and then put it aside to take to my father when I see him later this month.

Here’s that clipping. My dad is second from left.

I just kept going through the stuff, noting the actions and putting some of them in the Action folder. I actually ended up taking action on all the Written Stuff (I don’t think there were even 10 items) because when I started looking at the Picture Stuff I got overwhelmed.

I’m feeling great about the Written Stuff and will systematically start going through the Picture Stuff. Since the photos overwhelm me, I know that I will benefit from using Stacy’s methodology and I know that a timer will be my best friend. I’ll work on it just 10 or 15 minutes at a time. When I get finished, I’ll post again!

 

Going through my box of inherited items: step one

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On November 13, 2020 I wrote these words in a blog post about Stacy Julian’s method for going through a box of family photos, documents and memorabilia.

“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.”

Nine months later, I finally opened that box this past weekend. I was excited to use Stacy’s method, which I had first heard about in her terrific 2020 RootsTech presentation. I decided to go through each of Stacy’s five steps and blog about each step after I finished it.

The first step is to sort the contents of the box into five categories:

  1. Picture Stuff
  2. Written Stuff
  3. Document Stuff
  4. Memorabilia Stuff
  5. Dimensional Stuff

I had an unused Elfa rolling  file cart and I rolled it to my workspace. I used sticky notes to label the folders. Here’s how it looked right before I started sorting:

It took me only 30 minutes to sort the entire contents of the box. As I had expected, the box contained primarily photos. I was able to tell by the handwriting on the back of many of them that at least some of the contents of the box had come from my grandmother, Susie Jeffries Brown, after she passed away in 1999. It was so touching to handle these items and remember my grandmother. (Today is my grandmother’s birthday! She was born 24 Aug 1908.) Some of the photos were framed in paper folders or wood or metal frames and I created a second Picture Stuff folder to contain those.

In addition to photos, there were some newspaper articles, as well as some other written items, including my parents’ wedding vows. (Those went into Written Stuff folder.) There were a few books, including an illustrated edition of Aesop’s Fables that had been given to my grandfather, Crawford Brown (1906-1996) in 1914. It was a Christmas gift from his grandmother, Antoinette Garlock Brown (1855-1922).

There was also a collection of the embroidery pieces I created as a kid and gave to my grandmother. She had framed them and hung them on the wall of the apartment she shared with my grandfather in their retirement home. (How sweet is that?) That’s a photo of one of them at the top of the post. The Elfa file cart has two drawers on the bottom and I ended up using both of them to hold all the dimensional stuff.

I worked hard not to spend a lot of time on individual items. The goal was to simply sort them to make them accessible. And it felt great. I can’t wait to dig in to the individual pieces.

In the next step, I will take a closer look at each document and assess value and usefulness of each item, according to Stacy’s methodology, which is detailed in her post, How to BEGIN with the BOX, on StacyJulian.com. I’ll blog about step two as soon as I finish it!

Here’s my post on step two!

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.