Offering insight and perspectives on Family History, photography, family fun, and more. Each guest blogger has a unique message to help inspire you.
You should always keep your photo negatives, of course. But is there more to do with them besides simply storing them? Here’s how you can turn your photo negatives into useful tools for family history.
You’ve created your Family History Project from your Ancestry.com tree, but it has so many pages and the cost is more than you expected. I had the same experience when I created my first album. Here’s why you have so many pages and how to address it.
The word “serendipity” was first used in 1754 by Horace Walpole in a letter wherein he remarked on “making discoveries, by accident or sagacity, of things that they were not in quest of”. In family history it applies when the researcher finds useful information that they were not intentionally looking for. This is a tale of one such instance.
I first learned to take a closer look at old photographs not with those in my family’s own collection, but by studying a forgotten photograph album picked up at an antique store. The photographs within this album dated to the Civil War, and in an effort to identify the individuals based on a few faded captions, I studied them carefully. Who were the women wearing stunning, full-skirted dresses? Who were the children with the solemn faces and neatly curled hair? Might the portraits of bewhiskered men have been a last memento before they left home for battle?
Sweden. A country that conjures up images of ABBA, safe cars and furniture that you buy flat and have to put together. If you have ever done any research into Swedish ancestors, however, Sweden will also conjure up names like ‘Johan’, ‘Olaf’, ‘Anders Andersson’, ‘Olaf Olafsson’ and of course their children ‘Anders Johansson’ and ‘Johan Olafsson’. But Swedish genealogy doesn’t have to be all headaches and mazes of Johans. With careful preparation and an understanding of how Swedish archives work, research in to Swedish genealogy can be very rewarding very quickly.
At one point every genealogist hits the proverbial brick wall in genealogy research. Everything comes to a standstill and we try to decide what we want to know and how we should proceed. The answer will be different for each researcher, and even within separate family lines. For instance…
Grandma C. was a special lady. She always knew the right thing to say – always. She was Irish by descent, but cooked a mean Italian Sunday dinner. Perhaps most importantly, she knew how to have a good time. When we visited, it was a tradition to…
I was a single, military parent with three (very hyper) little boys, aged nine, seven and four.
It was too easy getting them involved in my genealogy research, because for them it was another adventure!
Our first road trip was to a local cemetery to photograph some stones for a special commission in Ontario.
I found a quilt top that tells its own story. The names of the women who made its pieces are stitched on each square in a variety of colors and lovingly prepared. The names are my maternal grandfather’s family. When I started closely examining it, I realized…
When I first began collecting postcards, I was primarily interested in cards with local images. I gradually expanded my collection to include holiday and birthday postcards. One day, while browsing through a large rack of postcards at an antique store, I noticed several cards that were all sent to the same address. At that point, my interest in old postcards converged with my lifelong interest in family history…