Tag Archives: family history

Monday’s Link Roundup.

Posted on December 5, 2011 | Leave a comment

In this week’s Monday’s Link Roundup, if you self-publish, don’t miss Book Design for Self-Publishers: Raw Materials.   This is a terrific site for anyone involved in book design.  And if you’re like me and don’t include pricing on your website, you might change your mind after reading Why We Are Afraid to Talk Pricing.

  • Telling Life Stories Through Quilts. “Generations of women have been telling stories in fabric — with quilts. Lisa Morehouse paid a visit to one quilting bee in Mendocino County’s Anderson Valley. Many of the group’s members emigrated to work in the local apple orchards and vineyards.”
  • End of life: You shared your stories. “As part of the Globe’s in-depth series on End of Life decisions in the 21st century, we asked you to tell your stories around this difficult topic. Readers from across the country joined the conversation.”
  • The Life Reports II. “A few weeks ago, I asked people over 70 to send me “Life Reports” — essays about their own lives and what they’d done poorly and well. They make for fascinating and addictive reading, and I’ve tried to extract a few general life lessons.”
  • Not Your Grandmother’s Genealogy Hobby. “Wikis, social-networking sites, search engines and online courses are changing genealogy from a loner’s hobby to a social butterfly’s field day. New tools and expansive digital archives, including many with images of original documents, are helping newbies research like pros.”
  • Why We Are Afraid to Talk Pricing. “Think about the last time you went to a website for a product or service that you couldn’t buy outright online. Did it list prices? Or did the site encourage you to call for more information? How many times do you walk away from a purchase simply because you couldn’t get enough information on pricing to make an informed decision?”
  • Book Design for Self-Publishers: Raw Materials. “When you sit down to design a book, there are organizational tasks you have to address right at the beginning. Getting your raw materials organized and making sure your workflow will produce an efficient publishing process are important enough to spend some quality time on. Let’s take them one at a time.”
  • Family Tree Magazine Podcast Episode Notes. “Tips on how to get relatives to discuss family history, a discussion of the Historic American Cookbook Project, and news on the Genealogists for Families project at Kiva.com. Plus: Learn more about creating a family history book from Family Tree University’s Nancy Hendrickson.”

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Encore! Scrabble And Family Stories.

Posted on December 1, 2011 | Leave a comment
Scrabble 2

Image via Wikipedia

I read an essay, Lessons Beyond Words by Darren Yourk, on the Globe and Mail website.  It’s subtitled, While thrashing me at Scrabble, Grandma did more than expand my vocabulary. She shared our family’s story. Yourk’s piece is both humorous and touching. Here’s an excerpt… Read more.

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Posted in Life stories, Personal historian, Tips

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Posted on October 31, 2011 | Leave a comment

Another Monday’s Link Roundup brimming with a harvest of goodies. If you’re looking for a thoughtful essay on memory, take a look at Memoirs and Memories. And for a fascinating item on the history of traveling libraries, you’ll want to read Some little-discussed history of the traveling library.

  • Asking Permission. “As I work on various projects I often see images that I’d love to include in a publication. Locating the owner is often difficult. But before you can use an image in a publication or on a website, you need to obtain permission from the owner. Here are a few tips to help.”
  • Books: A Living History. “In Books: A Living History, Australian historian Martyn Lyons (of A History of Reading and Writing in the Western World fame) explores how books became one of the most efficient and enduring information technologies ever invented — something we seem to forget in an era plagued by techno-dystopian alarmism about the death of books.”
  • 10 Traits that Make You a Master Networker—and Grow Your Business. “Networking is more than shaking hands and passing around business cards. Based on a survey I conducted of more than 2,000 people throughout the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, it’s about building your “social capital.” The highest-rated traits in the survey are the ones related to developing and maintaining good relationships.”
  • Memoirs and Memory. “…as I came to see that our memories aren’t really patchy; they’re patchworks, oddly and randomly retrieved bits and scraps that we weave together into something we believe to be a more integrated, seamless fabric than it really is… I don’t worry that the scenes are significantly inaccurate or even remotely embellished. I worry about what’s not there and might have made for an even better story.”
  • Is This the Future of Punctuation!? “People fuss about punctuation not only because it clarifies meaning but also because its neglect appears to reflect wider social decline. And while the big social battles seem intractable, smaller battles over the use of the apostrophe feel like they can be won.”
  • Some little-discussed history of the traveling library. “Mary L. Titcomb, who sent out that first traveling library in 1905, popularized it evidenced via all kinds of metrics. In fact today, all 50 U.S. states still have traveling branch library services. “They’re traveling cathedrals of beauty and truth and peace,” says Anne Lamott.”

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Manage and Share Your Family Photos with Flickr.

Posted on May 21, 2009 | 2 Comments

flickrThanks to Denise Olson at Family Matters for pointing out the value of Flickr for family history projects. If you don’t already know, Flickr is a web based application which allows you to upload, edit, archive and share your photographs  with others.  The basic account is simple to set up and free. For a modest $25 a year, you can get a Flickr Pro account with unlimited space.  I discovered Flickr when I was writing my mother’s life story. It was  perfect for uploading her photographs and organizing them into groups. I could even edit and clean up some of the more damaged pictures. To me,  Flickr’s great value  is that it provides a secure place to keep your treasured photos. You no longer have to fear that should your hard drive crash, all your photos will be wiped out.

Of value too are Flickr groups:

Groups are a way for people to come together around a common interest, be it a love of small dogs, a passion for food, a recent wedding or an interest in exploring photographic techniques. And if you can’t find a group which interests you, it’s super-easy to start your own.

Groups can either be public, public (invite only) or completely private. Every group has a pool for sharing photos and videos and a discussion board for talking.

Flickr has 36 million users and an assortment of  groups of particular interest to personal historians.  Here’s a sample:

  • Old Photos has more than 4,600 members and over 47,000 photos in the collection.
  • 100 Years Old has more than 4,000 members and over 9,000 photos – each more than 100 years old.
  • Scrapbook has 1,754 members and close to 17,000 photos.

If you want to organize and manage your family, check out Flickr. You won’t be disappointed.

Photo by Mohammad Tajer

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Posted in Editing, How to, Life stories, Photos, Preservation, Resources, Tips

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Are Those Memories of Yours Really Accurate?

Posted on November 6, 2008 | Leave a comment

It seems that the way our brains store and recollect memories is kind of quirky. Our brains frequently convert rumors, falsities and opinions into perceived, recollected fact says Scott LaFee in an article in The San Diego Union-Tribune.

Everybody does it,” said Sam Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton University. “Memory formation and retrieval isn’t like writing something down on a piece of paper. Memories drift and change, and things we may have once doubted, we no longer do.

As we recall stored facts, said Wang, our brains reprocess them, collate them with new information, re-interpret the result, then re-store them as new and “improved” memories.

What does that mean for those of us writing our own memoir? I think what we need to keep in mind is that we want to render a three dimensional portrait not fret about getting every little detail correct. What’s important is that it’s your story, your recollections, your response to the events in your life. So what, if your brother or sister saw things differently. It’s not their story.

What I aim for in producing a life story for my clients is something more than just a chronological retelling of the events in their lives. I want to know how they responded to events; how they felt; the life lessons they learned; the values and passions that have driven them; their triumphs and tragedies and their hopes and dreams.

So, don’t worry. Like me and everyone else, our past memories are most likely an amalgam of fact and fiction. What’s really important is that we start recording and preserving memories now before they’re lost forever.

Photo by dierk schaefer

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