Photo book

Yesterday’s post mentioned I purchased a small photo album to save holiday cards for our granddaughter.

These little photo cards are a snapshot of our immediate family’s year. It is a family tradition. These cards are distributed to our friends and family, long time friends of the kids, and some of DIL’s family.

I am adding to this tradition by making a photo book for granddaughter each year. The photo book will be an expanded version of the holiday cards. I am including information and photos about all seven of us. It will be a family photo book (not a baby book). 

I am gifting this family photo book at what might seem like an unusual time, Valentines Day.

February 14 deadline (each year) gives me plenty of time to construct and order the book reflecting January 1 - December 31 of the previous year. 

I can get the whole previous year in, including Christmas and New Years, by using Valentines Day as my gift date. 

The title of each book is the year. That helps simplify. The books will be very uniform.

The family photo book gives me a family tradition gift to send each year, on Valentine’s Day. 

This meaningful gift will help avoid gift clutter. It will probably be less expensive to send a custom photo book than buy nonsense and pay shipping. I will have it shipped directly. 

Having the deadline be tied to a holiday/gift should ensure it gets done once a year. A deadline is important. My deadline will be granddaughter’s family tradition.

Granddaughter was born late spring 2024. So yes, the 2024 book will be a partial year, for granddaughter’s pictures, but it will still be a very full book. There are activities for the other six of us, from the whole year. We had two baby showers prior to her birth. There are a lot of baby pictures. We all visited in 2024. There are six pets in the family. 

Three Genealogy podcasts

https://www.amyjohnsoncrow.com/announcing-generations-cafe-genealogy-podcast/

Amy Johnson Crow started a genealogy podcast (link above) in 2018. It does not appear to be active now, but the archive (72 episodes) is fantastic, in my opinion. Her sound quality is excellent. Her topics are helpful and she has a nice, simple presentation style. If you are just getting started in genealogy or would simply like a refresher, this is a good place to go. 

Amy Johnson Crow has one book available - 

Her website lists workshops in 2022, I am not sure if that is continuing. 

After you finished this series, my next suggestion would be a mother daughter team, Diana Elder and Nicole Dyer, podcast -

https://familylocket.com/the-research-like-a-pro-genealogy-podcast/

There are 240+ podcasts in this series as of this writing. These podcasts are longer and more detailed. They do an outstanding job. 

This pair offers webinars and classes. They have two books - 

An excellent British Genealogy Podcast - 

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/journeys-into-genealogy-podcast/id1541830347

Great guests, great topics, great accents. This podcast has about 50 episodes and has been running since late 2020. 

Excel family chart/tree

As part of the submission process for the certificate programs in county genealogy societies, a family chart/tree is required. 

I am working on a project to submit multiple ancestors as a means of saving/sharing research. My multiple packets will require slightly different family trees. 

Looking at the papers previously submitted, in other people’s  packets, most of those trees were handwritten (see blank form below). 

My arthritic hands could never take that much writing, my writing is not that clear, also good way to make an error. 

Here is what a standard form (fill in the blanks, meant to be hand written) looks like -

My youngest built an Excel template for me to use. 

As she typed, she took screen shots and texted them to me so I could edit as she worked. Here are three in a long line of texts. 

She started with the far right column because the math/space was very specific for 16 boxes. 

She worked her way to the left, letting the math/space dictate the design. 

Early on she added the background shading to make the boxes pop. 

Note there are only attachment lines on box #1 to the far left. Attaching the rest of the boxes at the corners, simplified the page considerably. 

It is very readable, even with no data on the page. Again, the background shading makes a huge difference. 

I will start with the oldest documented maternal/paternal ancestors, my 4x great grandparents, on the far right column. And do one page with the oldest ancestors, my maternal grandfather’s two family lines (4x, 3x, 2x, 1x great grandparents) who have been in my county from 1849 and the mid 1850’s.

I will add a first page with me, my parents, my maternal grandparents, and my great grandparents. I will add a note to verify which family line is continuing with more details on page two. 

On both pages, I will use the bold function to highlight the exact family line I am documenting. 

My first submission is my maternal grandfather’s, mother’s, father’s, father’s, mother who died in 1867.

PS - I have Legacy family tree software on my PC, but (to the best of my knowledge) it does not print out a format to get this many people on a single piece of paper. 

Every thirty years

One of my husband’s uncles was a family genealogist like I am. 

At least thirty years ago he organized his materials, typed/copied/distributed his research work. 

In those papers, one page talked about the contemporary family. It was first name and birth year only. 

At the wedding in Chicago in October, one of the oldest members of the family asked for that one page to be expanded/updated. 

I volunteered. 

It was been quite the project. Frankly it would never have occurred to me to do this. But it is an extremely valuable collection of data. Consider the records a family would have if every 30 years someone updated/recorded. 

There are now 58 members on this side of the family starting with my husband’s father and two uncles, and including their children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, and all the spouses. This 58 does not include the short term spouses of two of the 11 cousins. Both guys are embarrassed by these marriages. I was willing to let them go, a marriage of just a couple months with no children, okay. 

I am including full names, birthdates/locations, parents names, spouses full names/birthdate/location/parents names/mother’s maiden names, wedding date/location, and educations for everyone. I have everyone’s high school name/location/graduation year. And I have everyone’s college name/location, degrees and graduation years.

As I gathered information and typed, I sent screen shots to the specific individuals to proof. 

This is all rolled into a pdf to send to the extended family. 

This project has also updated my address book greatly, which added names to my holiday card list. So we are better in touch with extended family. 

Identifying photos during a scanning visit

My mom, husband and I went to my mom’s first cousin’s house to scan photos, a couple Saturday’s ago. 

This is our second time going to a relatives for a mass scan, we went to Iowa in the summer of 2019, very good timing. Middle went with us to my husband’s cousin’s house, we stayed the weekend. Eight months later, we were in a long lockdown. 

On that first trip, my husband labeled each photo, on his lap top, as he scanned, which was time consuming. 

This trip, I used post it notes and the camera on my phone, which worked better. 

What mattered, what I needed to document, was what I did not know by sight.

I knew I was coming home to move the photos from my husband’s laptop, which we had taken in order to use our portable flatbed Epson scanner, to our PC. I also knew I was immediately going through all the photos, labeling them on the PC. 

So I only needed to make notes on what I did not know, mostly years and locations. If I knew the people, I did not need a note. 

This worked very well. I wrote most of the notes myself as I loaded the scanner. Sometimes my mom’s cousin wrote longer things out for me. Most of the photos were not labeled. I had my mom and her two cousins to help look/think/calculate. I am very good with identifying people in photos. 

My husband ran the laptop/scanner. 

(My mom mostly enjoyed looking at photos and talking with her cousins, who she had not seen in person in decades, but chats with them online on occasion.)

Another 100 year old album

I am on my 3rd or 4th 100+ year old photo album. 

These are the ones with heavy black construction paper like pages.  The albums are absolutely crumbling and not at all archival safe. 

The photos in this one are are fading fast even though they have not been exposed to light. 

The first 2-3 albums, I carefully disassembled. I was able to save all the photos. 

This album, someone was very heavy handed with the glue. I cannot remove all the photos safely. 

This album belonged to my husband’s maternal grandfather. He was in the navy, aboard The Wyoming, WWI.

We have scanned every photo worth saving. My husband emailed copies to his three brothers. All of the photos will go on my genealogy blog for that family line. 

The album and all the photos are eventually headed to my local library, but I did not have enough family information to write a thorough bio sheet. 

We had a meeting with a genealogist yesterday morning and she was able to help. This is a (free) service available through my local library.

She made me feel very good. I had written down everything I had found carefully. But I was quite stuck. She found enough to get me over the hump, so I can continue researching that line myself. But she made a point of telling me it was hard going. When I got stuck, it was for good reason. 

A public service announcement about old yearbooks

I am pleased to share - my senior yearbook (1979) went to a county library. I used the post office’s book rate, shipping was very inexpensive. (My brother is now looking thru his things to see if he still has his yearbooks.)

This is not the library in my old high school town. It is actually the next town over, but in the same county. 

This library has a very large genealogy department including a huge collection of local high school yearbooks that they have scanned and put online. Their goal is to get one copy of every yearbook from all the high schools in their county. 

The 1931 yearbook, from my maternal grandfather, is posted on their site. 1931 was his sophomore year. His other three years worth of yearbooks are missing from the collection. He went to a high school two towns over from mine, but in the same county. 

In the process of looking at his one yearbook online, and (really) missing the other three of his years, it was clear the library needed more yearbooks to complete their collection. I found they had all their gap years posted on a “want list” by high school. And I realized all my own high school years (and my brother’s) were on that list. I called to verify and get the shipping address. 

The librarians were excited. I was bittersweet. I was so glad to have found a worthwhile home for my senior yearbook, but a little sad to only be shipping one book, not four.  

I thought I had yearbooks from all four of my high school years. And I thought I knew exactly where they were, in a box in the attic with my husband’s yearbooks. But mine from 9th thru 11th grade were not there, which is a mystery. 

In the process of hunting for my missing yearbooks, my mom realized she still had a variety of yearbooks from her second husband. Some high school, some college, some from when he was teaching, all of these were old. I donated them to the genealogy department my local library, they have a national collection of materials. They are very pleased to get them. 

The mystery 8th grade class photo from 1933.

The first story was the 152 mystery photos from my great grandma’s album that went to the library. The second story was Delbert. This class picture is (I think) my last mystery photo/the third story. It is so nice when things work out in threes. 

Unfortunately, the photo was clearly cut to fit some crazy shaped frame long ago. Many of the names are no longer readable on the back. I can sort of make out the ones on the front enough to be fairly certain no relatives are listed. I also do not recognize faces. Did you notice “8th grade” and “1933” handwritten on the bottom?

First, I sent this electronic image to the genealogy department in my birth town library. The lady there can work magic. I heard back pretty quickly that she had traced several of the names to Dolton, Illinois. They suggested I write to the genealogy society there, I did. 

Part of that makes sense. My maternal grandmother lived in Dolton as a child. 1933 is about right for her to be in 8th grade. Two problems: she does not appear to be in this picture. I think she only completed the 6th grade. 

I heard back from Dolton genealogy society. This is what they said -

“This school still exists. It is in the elementary school district where I attended as a child. The school is located at 14151 Lincoln Avenue, Dolton, IL. It is in District #148 which covers parts of Riverdale and Dolton. The district office is located at 114 W. 144th Street, Riverdale, IL 60827. phone 708-841-2290. I looked for some of the names that were listed on the photo. Most of these students were born in 1920 in Dolton. I tried to locate a graduation list on Newspapers.com but could not find one. The Pointer was the local newspaper in Riverdale and Dolton at that time. I know that the Dolton Public Library has microfilm of the Pointer newspaper. I would check with them to see if they can locate a graduation list. Please send a donation to our Society for the time spent researching this question.”

I first mailed them a check for $5. I rarely have to pay, on this project I ended up paying twice. 

She did not state the name of the school, I looked it up from the address. It is Lincoln Elementary. The “Lincoln” becomes ironic later in the story. 

Then I called the Dolton library and the reference librarian told me their microfilm machine broke and they pitched all their microfilm. (I wrote back to the Dolton genealogy society and told them this shocking news). 

Then I called the School District office and was told by the assistant that their records do not go back that far. I left a message for one of the head people, just incase. 

Then stumped, I called my genealogy department at my local library. He gave me the number for the Illinois State library. I did not know there were state libraries. The Illinois State library could not help me, but gave me the number for the Abe Lincoln Presidential Library. 

And the reference librarian at the presidential library confirmed they have newspaper archives from the Pointer newspaper in Dolton/Riverdale from 1933.

I had to register (online) with the Abe Lincoln library. There is a $5 fee for each article, and they are sent by email as a PDF. 

I sent the reference librarian (doing the actual search) a copy of the front and bank of the photo as well as the information from my birth town library and the genealogy society in Dolton. 

I heard this past week that she had success. I mailed my $5 check, online payment is usually not available for these searches. So I should be getting my PDF, maybe this coming week. 

I have a plan. If the list confirms no one in my family is in this photo, I will do two things. I will first see if my local library genealogy department wants to scan/post the photo and class list. And then I will see if the Abe Lincoln Presidental library wants the actual photo. 

Delbert

I do not pitch things lightly. And that definitely includes photos. 

As I have shipped and shipped, 23 packages, the piles have definitely dwindled. I am left with my direct line/keeper people which now feels very manageable.

But I was also left with mystery/unknown photos. I have been working on those, steadily. 

Dropping off 152 unknowns at the library definitely helped reduce my mystery pile. That left just a few. 

It is just crazy what I have found in the unknown photo stash. Here is a good example -

(There were more photos). 

I have absolutely no idea how we have these pictures. The city and the face and the name mean nothing to me, my mother, my mother’s sister, my mother’s sister-in-law and brother. 

I am pretty sure I found the right guy and posted them on Find a Grave, so they are saved. 

The Genealogy Dept in my birth town, who knows my extended family, could not place him (as related to my family) either. But they found his grandson’s mailing address for me. 

I sent the package of photos with this note - 

January 25, 2022

A couple years ago, my mom and I started sorting extended family photos including those of my grandparents and great grandparents. (My mom just turned 81, and lives a couple blocks from me. I am turning 61 in March.) The photo clean out has been a very worthwhile project, and much easier to do while my mom is still alive/well/able to help identify/sort. 

We ran across the enclosed packet of photos. We suspect they were in with my great grandmother’s things. Her name was ________________ and she lived at Koontz Lake in Walkerton, Indiana. We are only guessing this because Pierceton and Koontz Lake are sort of near to each other. Otherwise, it is an utter mystery to us, how these photos ended up at my house. 

The genealogy department at the _______ County library was able to trace Delbert and if they are correct, you are his grandson. If this is not correct, please contact me. If it is correct – surprise, here are photos of your grandfather from long ago. 

Either way, my mother and I are very curious to hear from you. Maybe you have an older relative that might shed some light on these mystery photos.

The unknown photos from my great grandmother’s album

As I mentioned, after I shipped hundreds of photos, I was able to focus on what I had left. Besides my direct line keepers, I had a lot of unknowns. I do not pitch photos easily, but I also have a use it or lose it philosophy, finding a solution for a pile of unidentifiable photos required thought. 

Last month, with much relief, I dropped a large envelope with 152 photos off at the local genealogy department. Yes, that picture (below) is 152 photos, doesn’t look like that much, does it? 

In Indiana, many county libraries have very good (staffed) genealogy departments. I use several of them regularly. The one in my town happens to be one of the best in the country.  

I had called earlier and explained that I had unlabeled photos from my great grandmother’s album that were approximately WWI era. They discussed it within the department and then called to say that yes, they wanted them, if I was willing to write an accompanying piece about my great grandmother. 

I wrote, youngest helped me edit. I included information about my great grandma’s parents and grandparents and two husband’s. I talked about the restaurant that her mother and step-father ran in the early 1900’s near the railroad station, where they worked and met many people. I talked about who might be in the photos, mentioning family lines and WWI soldiers. 

The library is going to scan the photos and include my piece when they post the collection online. I am not sure if it will be edited or included as I wrote it. 

The relief, to have something meaningful to do with those photos, was huge. I estimate that most were taken before 1922. So yes, 100 year old photos. 

I could not bring myself to pitch them. But I had to think very hard what to do with them. 

The extended family photo project

My mother sorted/divided/distributed photos from her second husband’s side of the family a couple years ago. So all those family photos are now in the hands of his children and grandchildren. It was a huge relief to her, and to me, very smart/proactive, and as a 2nd wife, a kind thing to do. 

Then, my mom sorted out the rest of her photos and brought the lot, from our side of the family, over to my house. Hundreds and hundreds of photos. 

I absolutely wanted the photos and it was very good to do this while she was still alive. Before she gave them to me, she wrote on the back of almost all of them. And she sorted as best she could, but they were still a bit of a jumble, many envelopes, folders, boxes. 

I totally changed my mind on what to do with these photos.

My intention, at the time she gave me the piles, was to put all those extended family photos in my red genealogy binders. Thankfully I started on a few stacks, but never really got to it. 

Recently, I rethought the whole concept.  

I realized none of my kids will want any of these extended family photos. And they do not know most of these people by sight, they would not be able to sort these photos. And it would be a terrible dilemma for them. When a house gets cleaned out, probably it all just gets pitched or stored in boxes forever. (Probably they will not want my red genealogy binders either.)

So, with my husband helping me, we went through our own photo albums, my mother’s stacks (which included photos from my grandmother and great grandmother), and the red genealogy binders.  We started dividing photos, very very aggressively. Our plan - to distribute extended family photos to the extended family. 

Which extended family?

I have five maternal first cousins, all their parents/my aunts and uncles are still alive and now in their mid to late 70’s. I am not sending pictures to the older folks, who hopefully have started cleaning out their own houses. Instead I am sending directly to their kids, my first cousins. And I am sending to my niece and nephew, my brother’s children, and my brother. 

I knew I had all current addresses, from my last two years of Christmas card mailings. I am not asking anyone in advance if they wanted photos. I am not asking anyone any questions (except my mother). And I think this is key. If they want to pitch, rehome, redivide, whatever, that is on them. But those stacks of photos are all going to be out of my house and are already gone from my mother’s house.

How did we start sorting?

If you are wondering about the practicalities, we cleaned off the kitchen table, made signs to identify the piles and just dug in to the sorting on a recent Saturday.

We started with our house set of photo albums. My husband put them on the kitchen table and we went thru every picture pulling ones of just the extended family. If we were also in the pictures, sometimes we saved them, often they went in the piles.

Then we went thru my mom’s piles. This was the hard part, there were a lot. I had to do the very old ones, my husband was able to focus on my brother/niece/nephew who he could easily recognize.  

We pulled for my cousins, brother, niece, nephew. 

We saved photos of me, my mother, my grandparents, my great grandparents and great-great grandparents. I saved some of the pictures of us with other family members, I shared others. My mother thought she had destroyed all her first wedding pictures. She had not, I found an envelope full and was glad to see them. Many of the pictures I kept came from my mother’s, grandmother’s and great grandmother’s photo albums which we had disassembled several years ago. The albums were not photo safe and were crumbling. My mother wrote on the back of all the ones we pulled from albums.

Then we went thru the red genealogy binders and pulled the pertinent pictures I had already filed. 

By the end of that Saturday, we were sorted and the photos were safe in plastic bags. And we figured out and assembled boxes for shipping. 

That was a 8+ hour project, but it was easier to do the sorting all in one go. 

This photo (below) amuses me because it looks so simple. There are hundreds of photos in those bags. But, the bags all look so small in this picture. There were too many photos to use padded envelopes. We needed boxes, which I had. 

It was important to pause, a long pause in fact, I am still paused.

And then I purposely paused. The kitchen table stayed exactly like the above photo. The boxes are all addressed with the bags of photos in them,  but the boxes are not yet sealed.

By myself, taking my time, I am going back thru each plastic bag, carefully, to see if we made any mistakes or if I changed my mind about any photos. I am taking photos with my phone of a few pictures.

I called my mom and she looked thru her house several more times to be sure she had gotten everything. 

I am still looking carefully at my house to be sure we got everything. I have a large metal cabinet upstairs, which I think is full of pictures from my husband’s side, but we are going thru it now. 

And I am writing notes to include with each box, when they are eventually shipped. 

What were all these pictures? 

My cousins, niece/nephew, brother will all receive pictures of themselves solo, or with/of their family (parents, siblings, aunts/uncles, grandparents). 

Many of these pictures had come at holidays over the decades, photo Christmas cards, professional individual or family portraits, candids, baby pictures and school photos for example. There were also a lot of photos I had taken, candids from family gatherings, decades ago. I am almost 61. I often had a camera in hand as a child/teenager/young adult. And there were photos from my mom’s very old albums, my mom is 81.

A huge advantage, in dividing for my niece and nephew, was that because I had my mom’s stash and my stash, there were a lot of duplicates, so my niece and nephew each got important/identical photos in their piles. 

The rest of the sibling sets to my cousins, I just divided as evenly as I could. There are a lot of very old pictures of their parents/my aunt and uncle, in those sets that I am sure my cousins have never seen. 

Hopefully these boxes will be happily received. 

We are shipping hundreds of photos to people who, hopefully, will be very surprised and happy to receive them. Most importantly - hundreds of photos are headed out of my house and my kids will not have to deal with them. 

Find a Grave

This is the online system where genealogy/family graves are linked and there are pictures of gravestone inscriptions (and sometimes) family photos and obituaries added.

Very clever people are answering photo requests. This is happening in a wide spread way. More than one person is clearly taking photos, because I have had many requests filled in multiple counties in the last week.

So they are going to cemeteries, hunting graves, taking pictures of the stones and loading them in the system. Very clear social distancing. I am sure most cemeteries are deserted.

These particular cemeteries are mostly out in the middle of absolutely nothing and nowhere. Old country sites. So I know there is major social distancing.

Great solo activity. It takes a long time to find graves. And they are getting fresh air and sunshine and a real sense of accomplishment, I am sure.

Surprise

I have ended up with a lot of old, extended family pictures. I add many to Find a Grave as a means of sharing.

I have also found news clippings and photos of non-family members. If I know who they are, I stop and add them to Find a Grave. When I do, my name is attached to the entry. The owner of the memorial, and anyone else looking at the site, knows who added the picture.

I had a woman contact me yesterday. I had added a birthday picture of this woman’s great grandmother to her memorial. I did not know it, but it was the last birthday the grandma had before she died (early 1960’s). And the family had never seen the picture and did not have a copy.

She wrote to see who I was and how I had the picture.

I also have an antique bed and a quilt from that family, who was a close family friend of my paternal grandparents. My grandmother had given me the picture to say - that is who gave you the bed and quilt.

So I sent the great grand daughter (who is about my age)  pictures of the bed and the quilt.

And that has led to a big hunt. Because somewhere there is a note of someone who was born in that bed. And I do not think the name meant anything to me, but probably it is someone from this woman’s family.


PS
A few of the photos, I have added to Find a Grave, have been gravestone photos. Those have been particularly thrilling. My aunt had taken pictures of very old gravestones in the 1970’s or 1980’s. The stones were just barely readable in the pictures, they were so old and weathered. (These photos were in with the family pictures she sent to me.) I looked each up on Find A Grave. I scanned and added pictures to the memorials that were missing pictures. So at the time the memorials were added to the website, the stones were gone or unreadable. I added pictures that were taken 40-50 years ago. A major surprise for someone.

As I have walked thru cemeteries and found unreadable stones for my own family, I always have the same thought - probably there were pictures of these stones. I wonder what happened to them.

Finding Your Roots

Current season (6) just resumed on PBS.

Season 6, Episode 3 is now available on their website and app for a short time.

If this show is new to you and you love this episode, there are 5 previous seasons available a couple places (PBS members and maybe Amazon Prime). Wide variety of ethnic backgrounds and family stories covered. Sometimes episodes have a theme (African American performers in this one for example).

Genealogy blogs

I keep my genealogy documents in red three ring binders. I have a lot of binders. And most of the documentation is on closer family members - My parents and grandparents, the greats, aunts and uncles, the greats, etc. I also have  a lot of things on my computer. . I save documents, pictures, invitations, news clippings, obituaries, etc.

My mom has a friend whose genealogy research is all hand written. Binders and notebooks full.  (She is in her 80’s).

So where my binder has a copy of a death certificate, hers has handwritten notes on what the death certificate said. To be honest, I shake my head at that methodology.

I question what is actually going to happen to all that handwritten data. But I also wonder about mine.

My kids, my brother, my niece and nephew live in a very digital world. I would assume it will continue to get more digital. And decluttering and downsizing  will continue as the trend.

I am not sure if I have mentioned, I am scanning family archives of pictures, steadily, to both preserve and share them.

It started with pictures of my brother, which I scanned and texted to him and  his kids.

Then we made a trip out of state to my husband’s cousin. And we scanned pictures for two full days. We bought a flatbed scanner that hooked up to my husband’s laptop. He scanned and labeled every picture. We saved to both the lap top and drop box. We are the only ones to have copies of all those pictures.

And I have been scanning documents.

Those pictures and all my documents and the facts and stores about each person, require a home. Family trees are needed to explain. Everything needs to be organized and readable/understandable.

I needed a digital structure. I wanted one that could be private, was free, and was easy for me to use. I wanted something that could be opened on any phone or computer with no special program needed. I wanted something that could be printed into a book if wanted/needed.

So as I write, I am in the process of putting all my information and documents and pictures in a blog format for various branches of the family.  I put each branch on its own separate blog, for ease of volume and use. But I can link between the blogs, which is quite handy. I am using lots of tags and links as I go.

I am using blogger, because I am use to it.

I will give access to extended family who are interested.

So I am not sharing the genealogy blogs  here, but I wanted to mention the idea.

And if you happen to know of any genealogy blogs like this that are open, I would be interested in seeing them.

Story Worth

https://thebloggess.com/2019/05/07/tell-me-a-story/

Sarah and Liz have mentioned StoryWorth several times. I think Sarah's stepmother, who might be the only parent she has left alive, is doing this as a project for Sarah's daughter Violet, I think.

So, I wanted to mention it here, because I think it is a fabulous project.

putting old family photos in my red genealogy binders

Yesterday my mom helped me file pictures.

It rained all day, we were not able to move the grape hyacinths as we had planned.

I had a wide variety of photo pages, all archival safe. So pages made to hold 3”x5” vertical and horizontal, 4”x6”, 5”x7”, and 8”x10”. These were left from photo albums. And I was very happy to use them. Although now I need to order more 5”x7” pages.

We sorted pictures, only the ones I had in the computer room, put them in pages and then inserted pages into the corrected tabbed section of the right genealogy binder. So all the pictures of my grandma, are in her section with her papers.

My mother and one of my aunts had labeled almost all the pictures. My mom  and my aunt are both approaching 80.

All of this is because I am the youngest/last one. I am the last one who will know who any of these people are and how they fit together.

We took care of all the pictures I had downstairs. Upstairs is a metal cabinet full of pictures. Going to work my way thru that cabinet too. And my husband is going to have to help because a lot of that metal cabinet is his family’s pictures; all of his mother’s pictures came here when the boys cleaned out her houses. He went thru and scanned and emailed many identifiable pictures to his brothers, pictures of their immediate family. But he has done nothing long term, archival. Because every picture from his family is not labeled, he has procrastinated. That will leave our kids with a mess. And they do not know who many of those people are. My husband is the last one also. (We have the only kids.)

One of the genealogists at the library has two big bins of pictures where she does not know who anyone is. She has older relatives still alive, she scans pictures and puts them on an app where she wants all her extended family to log on and help label pictures. So far no one is participating. I think they are spread across the country so in person labeling is difficult. She needs to get on a plane and go to her oldest relatives, with the pictures.




I have very few pictures of myself as a child.

I have a few of my brother too. Last night I scanned and texted his pictures to my brother, my niece, my nephew. With the exception of his senior picture, my brother had never seen any of them.

And they might all be pictures I took, as a child. They look like a child’s eye. (We are six years apart).  Very candid pictures, just point and shoot. There were pictures of his 1st, 2nd, 3rd birthdays a couple early Christmases, that he did not know existed.

I have a few more that I will scans and send.

I did not hear from my niece but my nephew and his girlfriend thought they were hysterical. And I think scanned photos are more valuable to them than printed photos. (I have an office quality scanner). And it was free. And now his pictures are in a file on my computer.




I have been scanning and loading pictures on Find a Grave also. Relatives and also straggler photos that do not really have a place.

So when I have a random picture, that I do not really care about, friends of my grandparents for example, I scan it and load it to their (person in photo) grave. It gives a purpose to those stragglers.

My great uncle had two daughters and was divorced from their mother when they were very young. I had a picture of the girls together at age 2 and 3. It might be a picture their families have never seen. It is now attached to their graves.

I have been loading family pictures (attached to graves) too.

My red binders

My dark red genealogy binders all looked alike. There are about 20 binders now. Each houses a different section of my extended family. My husband’s family too. There are contemporary binders, my immediate family, my brother’s, my cousins’ families have binders too.

Middle went thru last night and put labels on the end of each one. And we lined them, across the back of the computer room counter.

So now I can tell which is which, and they are easily accessible, I think that will promote filing.

My mission is to have every piece of genealogy material in those binders.

All the papers are already filed. I add more all the time.

I started on pictures yesterday.



Anne just wrote about her own process-

https://altopower.wordpress.com/2019/04/30/2019-research-project-progress-report/

Anne - her mom’s wedding dress. Very clever.

https://altopower.wordpress.com/2018/01/27/what-i-did-with-moms-wedding-dress/#comment-14033

Anne is writing her way thru a very fun genealogy project, you might want to read along. . .

The first one is here,
https://altopower.wordpress.com/2018/01/08/getting-started-52ancestors/

The second one is here,
https://altopower.wordpress.com/2018/01/09/52-ancestors-2-favorite-photo/