Family History and Photo Organizing and Sharing

Connections to our past are important to developing and maintaining our sense of place, a sense of personal and local identity, and often add to our individual sense of purpose.

A well organized and shared family history and photo collection are one of the most tangible ways of staying connected to our past.

LocalArchiver.com now has a page at Facebook. In addition to receiving blog feeds, the page includes discussion boards and posting by others interested in family history and preserving, organizing, and sharing photos. The discussion boards are organized around several related topics.

In just a few days, the "Fan" base has grown rapidly. This helps me to know that folks are finding the information useful.

I hope the discussion boards grow into a full and rich dialogue among the many, many non-professional family photo preservationists who seek advice and/or have advice to offer.

Approaches to preserving, organizing and sharing is not an exact science, so it is expected that we can all learn from the experiences and knowledge of others.

Find Us on Facebook, and start or join a discussion.

We also invite you to explore the many articles at the main LocalArchiver.com website relative to managing photo collections.

Family History Month - Genealogy Research Service Free Trials

Both interest in genealogy and the sophistication of available research tools continue to expand.

As more record databases become available to be searched via the Internet, subscription genealogy information search services have become more productive. At the same time, these services have become much easier to use, and many have begun to use software to automatically identify links in database information that were difficult for individual researchers to make in the past.

Family History Month is a good time to consider exploring some of these online services. Two of the most widely used subscription services offer free trial periods of 7 to 14 days. To make the most of your free trial periods, sign up when you know that you will have some time available to adequately explore the services to see how productive they might be for your family.

Two of the leading genealogy research services are Ancestry.com and OneGreatFamily. Both offer free trial periods to give you the opportunity to explore their databases and overall research capabilities. After the trial, if you are happy with the progress you make relative to your family's history, you can decide on exactly how long you would like to extend your subscription. Both services offer monthly, quarterly, and annual subscriptions.

Many of the emails I receive about sharing and preserving family photos and documents are from people who have taken an interest in a family genealogy project. They often come to realize that family photos and documents add considerable color to raw name and date facts. In many cases, they quickly recognize that organizing, preserving, and sharing historical family photo and document finds is important to their overall satisfaction in the project and in coloring and preserving the rich family information they are gathering.

For more information on organizing, preserving, and sharing historical family photos and documents, visit LocalArchiver.com

Professional Preservation Standards and Community Historical Societies

There is little argument that some digitization and collection description standards are needed in order to effectively share the world's library and museum collections on the web.

To satisfy a global collection sharing goal, relatively complicated and costly cataloguing systems are being advocated by library, museum, and archiving professionals. The professional side of the debate suggests that it should be done once, and done to professional standards.

On the other side of the debate, resource constrained and volunteer managed community historical and genealogical societies often do not have the expertise or funding to accomplish what salaried professionals are advocating as standards.

Therefore, many community historical and genealogical societies may be left to design their own approach and standards for collection preservation and sharing. It may be appropriately decided that the typical vintage photo in a community historical society collection does not need to be scanned at the same resolution, and described in the same detail as an item in the scanning department of the Smithsonian.

The LocalArchiver would suggest that moving ahead with some level of digital preservation and sharing is more important than hoping to someday digitize a collection to professional standards. In the meantime, originals will still be properly stored with archival quality materials.

At a minimum, community societies can select some of their best photo and document images and share these with their local community through online galleries. Placing photo and document images on a website or share site is within the ability of many volunteers. For step by step guidance and discussion of alternative approaches, visit LocalArchiver.com.

Organizing Family Photos

As I poke around the Internet, I see plenty of advice on how to organize older photo prints. Clearly, this is a personal decision and any step that helps you locate a picture and improves storage/organization is useful. Common suggestions are to place the prints in archival quality storage containers by date or to organize the prints in albums or scrapbooks. Fine suggestions and viable alternatives.

However, if you want to supercharge your ability to preserve, locate, and share images, digitizing the prints by scanning before properly storing them will increase your near and long term flexibility tremendously. You do not necessarily need to scan the prints yourself as there are professional scanning services that can do the job for you at a reasaonable price.

With older prints available as digital images, you can consolidate your image collection with your more recent photos, which you likely already have in digital format.

Now the fun begins. As online image services continue to expand and become easier to use, you can accomplish many satisfying and creative projects easily and inexpensively.

• Upload some of the digital images to a free online album so that extended family members can order prints or gift items of the images.


• Create a free family share site for family members to share images, schedules, ideas, favorite links, genealogical updates, recipes, etc.


• Upload some themed images and add captions and text to create a photo book of a family trip or a portion of family history to mark a significant birthday.


• Take those digital images and organize them using software like Photoshop Elements. With such software, you can create your own album categories and searchable keywords or "tags". Now you have a searchable digital image library and you are able to find all photos of uncle Pete simply by typing Pete into the search field. You can also find all photos in a given category such as "ancestors", simply by clicking on the category name.

Yes, there is a cost in having photos scanned professionally or in time to do it yourself. However, those old prints are probably one of the most valuable things you own. If you are planning to organize your older prints, the added step of digitizing them is one that will provide you many aditional ways to share the images in the future.

For detailed guides on how to scan, organize, and share family photo and document images, pay a visit to LocalArchiver.com.

Genealogical & Historical Societies - Common Interests

It is interesting to explore the websites of organizations which have titled themselves as either genealogical societies or historical societies. Such titles often distinguish the emphasis of their activities. However, many of their objectives and interests are similar.

Although some genealogical societies limit their activities to helping individuals trace family lineages, many move beyond the family tree to family history. Once a society includes family history in its objectives, it is difficult to ignore how community history and family history become a common interest.

Sense of place, sense of community, and sense of personal identity are clearly related. The character, values, and legacy of many of our ancestors was very much shaped by the history of the communities in which they lived and raised there families.

For these reasons, many members of community historical societies have an interest in family genealogy projects, and many members of genealogical societies have a strong interest in community history.

It should not be a surprise that the mission statements and projects of many genealogical societies and historical societies reflect this common interest in family and community history.

Therefore, LocalArchiver's guides to preserving and sharing family and historical society photo and document collections are also guides to preserving and sharing family and community histories. For more color, see the LocalArchiver.com article on The Importance of Preserving Historical Photos and Documents.