The Most Important Thing To Do In Genealogy This Year

Why is it that we overlook or ignore easy tasks? Is it because those easy tasks are too readily forgotten, despite how important they are? It’s easy to scan through your email inbox and quickly delete the unwanted material. Right? It seems simple enough and is a time-saving decluttering tip repeatedly shared in social media. But, how often do you, or I, follow the advice? Yeah, for more people, not often enough. I'm not a decluttering expert, but I do know what the number one task in family history is and it's not adding new names to the tree. In fact, it is so simple that people often fail to do it. Then they kick themselves when it's too late. What is this simple, crucial task?

Labeling Photos

Ha! You thought it might be something earth-shattering. But honestly, you don't know just how important labeling photos is until after someone dies. Flipping through my grandmother's photo album after she, the oldest surviving member of her generation, died I felt a tug in my heart. Would anyone be able to help me piece together the mystery men and women in her photo collection? Perhaps my mother remembers who the unidentified people and places are. When my mother died, the unlabeled photos problem was heart-wrenching. The opportunity to ask about her mother's photo collection and her own was gone. No one was left alive to tell me anything. What's a girl to do when her mother's photo collection is in Texas, and 70% is unlabeled, and she has to return to Iowa by plane? DON'T WAIT until it's too late to label those photos. Labeling photos is not a new skill. It's so easy, anyone who knows how to write can do it. You don't need a particular app, a computer, or special training. The unlabeled pictures problem is as old as photography. People have been failing to label photos since the mid-1800s. If it weren’t true, there wouldn’t be unnamed persons from orphaned photo albums on a website like DeadFred.com. This year, stop overlooking this critical family history because it's simple. Dare to be different. BeDare to be the one whom many will sing your praises long after you’re gone. Be a labeler!!! Dig out every family photo album you own. Dig in Aunt Ethel’s attic. Go to Uncle Larry’s barn. Visit the crazy Grandma with ten cats (but take plenty of allergy medicine if you need to). Flip through the albums and loose photos and find tag the photos that are missing facts such as: who, what, when, and where. Once you have marked your unlabeled photos, search your memory or query those of your relatives to discover the stories behind the photos. When you have the information, use an archival quality pen (like this one from Zig) to label the back of your printed photos. If your photos are all digital, do the same with them. This time, you'll need a photo program that tags your images. Digitally mark the photos with the pertinent information. If every person, whether an experienced genealogist or just starting out, took the time to sift through their picture collections, then we would have a richer collective photo narrative. Don’t let the photos you, or your relative once owned become an orphaned photo in an estate sale or antique shop. We can’t recover the meaning of a picture when the person knowing the answers can no longer communicate with us.