Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Listen to me on the Exactly Enough Time Podcast

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I’m thrilled to be the guest on the most recent episode of Stacy Julian’s Exactly Time podcast. The episode, which was published yesterday, is called Janine Adams: Share with Confidence. In our conversation, Stacy and I discuss getting started with family history research and  organizing our research, along with sharing genealogy information with others, and favorite family stories.

I’ve been a fangirl of Stacy since I heard her speak at RootsTech in 2020 and if you’ve been reading this blog awhile you know that I write about her How to BEGIN with the Box methodology and how I’ve applied it to my own inherited documents and memorabilia. (You can peruse my posts about Stacy by clicking this link, if you’re interested.)

Stacy is a wonderfully positive person with an enthusiasm that’s contagious. I hope you’ll give her podcast a listen–she has a lot to offer the family history community!

Sharing with confidence

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I had a wonderful conversation yesterday with Stacy Julian for her podcast, Exactly Enough Time. We talked about family history, organizing and sharing our family stories. The episode will be published later this month and I will definitely post a link.

Part of our conversation has stuck with me and I wanted to share it here. We talked a little about balancing the desire to share our research with the need to make sure what we share is accurate. In my opinion, it’s important to be confident about the accuracy of your research before sharing it. That doesn’t mean you need to write a fully-sourced history before you can share anything. It just means that what you share should be sourced and reliable.

Here’s what I do to make sure my research can be trusted:

I ensure that every fact that is entered into my database in Reunion has a source attached to it. And I look at every source critically before entering it into my database.

With those two procedures in place, I know that I can share everything in my database with confidence.

I encourage you to let go of the idea that you can’t share any of your research until it’s “finished” (whatever that means). Instead, just make sure your research is reliable so you can share any of it with confidence.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.

Are old photos hiding from you?

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I just spent a really rewarding nine days in my hometown of Walla Walla, Washington. I helped my 91-year-old father, Gene Adams, move into a lovely assisted living place. He’s really happy there and I’m feeling so good that he’s content and safe.

As part of my time in Walla Walla, I emptied his condominium so we could put it on the market. He and my mother bought the condo in 1991 and while my dad wasn’t a big accumulator of stuff (thank goodness), there was a basement storage room that I had not spent much time in. When it came time to empty the storage room, I discovered box upon box of old family photos and other ephemera. (One of the photos was the one of my brothers and me taken in about 1965 that’s at the top of this post.)

I was simultaneously thrilled and disappointed to find these photos. Thrilled because I can’t wait to carefully go through them. Disappointed because I would have loved to have gone through them with my mother when she was alive. She died in 2015 at 82 from Parkinson’s disease and in her last years wasn’t very mobile. We could have had a lovely time talking about and organizing these photos together.

So that leads me to a question for you: Are there family photos tucked out of sight in your home or in the homes of your relatives? Could you uncover them and enjoy them with your family members? It might be worthwhile to think about who you might ask and, of course, what you might do with them.

In addition to the boxes that were in my dad’s condo’s storage room, I also went through boxes of photos and documents that had come from my aunt’s home. When she moved into a care facility in February, I had these boxes delivered to my father’s condo to go through later. “Later” came very quickly! There are some treasures there as well. (And there were a lot of papers that she didn’t need to keep that added to my task. I blogged about that on my organizing blog yesterday.)

In all, I had seven boxes shipped to my home from Walla Walla. They should arrive at the end of the week. I would be lying if I told you I wasn’t overwhelmed at the prospect of how I’m going to deal with them. My plan right now is to use Stacy Julian’s How to BEGIN with the Box methodology to get started. I’m so grateful to have that starting point.

Keep an eye out for more posts as I go through this stuff! I’m sure it will be an organizing challenge that perhaps we can all benefit from.

Have you tried Collectionaire?

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I had a question from a reader recently about Collectionaire, an online tool for sharing family history information and keepsake media. I have to admit I hadn’t heard of it but I checked it out and was intrigued.

It appears to act as a hub where each person has a collection linked to a family tree. A click on a person in your tree brings up their collection and all the information and media you  have for them. You can easily share the collection with family members by providing a link (and you have control over which privileges to offer them).

Here’s the video from their website:

You don’t store information on Collectionaire. Rather, the keepsake media is stored in whatever cloud-based app(s) you choose, and they’re brought together in Collectionaire.

There’s a free tier, as well as two other plans at $2.99 a month and $4.99 a month.

I’m traveling now, so I haven’t had the chance to explore it, but I thought I’d turn to the experts here. If you’ve tried Collectionaire, I’d love to hear about your experience, good or bad. It seems to have such potential!