Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

Creating history for our descendants

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I wrote this Thanksgiving post last year and still really appreciate its message. I’m reposting it today in honor of Thanksgiving. (Perhaps I’ll make it an annual tradition!) Happy Thanksgiving to all my U.S. 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.

LeVar Burton’s RootsTech 2017 talk now available for viewing

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I attended RootsTech in February and one of my favorite keynotes was the one given by LeVar Burton, the original Kunta Kinte in Roots, the 1977 landmark mini-series. Roots aired on eight consecutive nights when I was in junior high and it made a huge impression on me.

I was really excited to hear him speak and I was not disappointed. The keynote was funny and moving and profound. I am not a crier and he brought tears to my eyes. I planned to share a link to my blog readers so you all could enjoy it and was disappointed that a speech wasn’t available for later viewing.

So I was delighted today to get an email saying that speech has been made available for viewing!

You can watch it here on the RootsTech website. In the 25-minute talk,  “LeVar Burton shares powerful thoughts on equality, race, history, and self-perception.” During the talk he himself cried. It was really moving. I urge you to watch.

Filling in the history in your ancestors’ timelines

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A couple of years ago, at RootsTech, I learned about HistoryLines. I was intrigued and signed up for a subscription. Then I pretty much forgot about it. (I blogged about it back then.)

HistoryLines creates a timeline for your ancestor (after you upload a GEDCOM or fill in data on an ancestor), referencing the historical events and social history of the time in which your ancestor lived.

This week I received a notification that my subscription was going to autorenew. I went to the site, intending to cancel since I never used it. But once I started exploring, I realized that this really is a tool I’d like to use.

This past quarter I focused almost exclusively on my great great grandfather, George Washington Adams (1845-1938) and his children. When I called up a HistoryLines story for him today I really enjoyed the context it placed his life in. I can see doing this for many of my ancestors, especially those I’ve studied more in depth. (So many of my ancestors seem like just names and dates to me, though I’m trying to change that.)

If you’re intrigued, here’s a promotional video from HistoryLines.

If you try it out, let me know what you think!

The joys of newspaper research

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This past month or so, I’ve been focusing my genealogy research on a small family unit: My great great grandfather, George Washington Adams, his second wife, Della, and their children. Even though I’m not directly descended from Della, their story (which I picked up on thanks to George’s Civil War pension file) has fascinated me and I’ve been trying to learn more.

I was able to connect some of the dots when I was at the Family History Library last week–many thanks to reader Maria Tello for helping me out there. I even found the death certificate for a child who was born and died between censuses, whom I hadn’t been aware of. With the connected dots I was able to verify some (and debunk some) of the information that was on Della’s Find A Grave page. That page referred to a couple of newspaper articles in the Daily Olympian of Olympia, Washington. I have a Newspapers.com subscription and looked up those articles there, but couldn’t find them. Nor were they available on the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America site.

When I was at the Expo at RootsTech, I stopped by the Genealogy Bank booth and quizzed them about what makes them special. The representative told me that something like 95 percent of their content is exclusive, so most of the articles they have are not available elsewhere. That was enough for me to give it a try. Taking advantage of the RootsTech discount, I signed up for a year for $60.

My very first search hit pay dirt. And since then, I’ve found more than a dozen really useful articles on this family. It’s not that the family members were famous; it’s just that the newspaper reported on little things, like club meetings, birthday parties and military promotions. And, of course, deaths.

I think my two biggest a ha moments were these:

  • I saw a photo of Della…it’s so nice to see what she looked like! (That’s the photo, above.)
  • I learned that Della and my great grandmother, Hattie Adams, were in the same chapter of the Daughters of Union Veterans club together, so I’m assuming they knew one another. Hattie was married to Elmer, one of George’s sons from his first wife. Henrietta. Since Della married George after Hattie and Elmer moved from Kentucky to Washington, I didn’t know whether Della had a relationship with George’s sons who lived in Olympia. Nor do I (yet) know why Della migrated to Washington from Kentucky after she and George were divorced. But that little bit of information makes me want to learn more!

The other thing I’ve enjoyed about looking at these old newspapers is learning a bit about daily life and also realizing that things aren’t all that different now than they were then. Some of the newspaper articles could have come out of our newspapers!

I learned about a few historical things I hadn’t known about (unrelated to my family) as well. I clipped some articles and put them in an Evernote notebook called “Historical observations.” For example, apparently some counties in northern California, together with some in southern Oregon, announced they were planning to secede from their respective states and form a 49th state, called “Jefferson.” This was in 1941. That was news to me!

If you haven’t mined newspapers for information on your family, I encourage you to do so. Based on my experience so far, Genealogy Bank is a worthwhile investment, if you have the money to spend.

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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.