FHF

It seems hard to believe, but not everyone will be able to do genealogy until they take their last breath. It’s important that we start planning for our genealogy retirement and ask ourselves, what are we going to do with our research when we’re done or no longer able to be involved? The hardest part of genealogy retirement is realizing that you need to tie up as many loose ends as you can without starting a new project. The second hardest is to realize not everyone wants what you have collected. You have to prioritize what is most valuable to preserve when you’re gone. Make the hard decisions and your research will have a better chance of survival. In this video, I'm covering the following topics and I've added additional links for your use. Organize Your Research Three things that you should do to get your files organized for passing them along to your progenitors are:  Put everything in its place with a label Go digital Discard easily accessible files Reducing, labeling, and...

Let's be brutal. Photos without stories are worthless. They are no better than the photos in picture frames you buy off the shelve with people you've never met and they probably didn't know before the photo shoot. Here are six tips to give your photos value by recording the story the photographer captured. 1. BE OBVIOUS Think of your collection of unidentified persons in photos. What is the number one thing you would like? NAMES! What's the second and third thing you wish the photographer had recorded? DATES & PLACES With that in mind, what do you think you should do first when giving your photos back their stories? Record the obvious facts of names, dates, and places. 2. GO DEEPER Explain the why : Why was this photo taken? What was happening? If the photo was taken in April 1942 in Grandma Helen's backyard and has the 5 Smith brothers, what was going on?  Was it really an Easter celebration, Spring equiniox, or Passover?  Was it a family reuni...

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...