Five Things You Need to Know About Digitizing Photos

December 7, 2015 Alison Taylor

Do you want to digitize your photos so that you can share them and hand them down to future generations? Follow these tips to create a quality digital archive.

There is nothing more heartbreaking for us than to talk to a client who has spent hours and dollars digitizing their photo collection, only to find out that the files are too small or too low-quality for archival purposes. They may look fine on Facebook, but when printed in a family history book or newspaper article, they will look blurry or pixelated. In many cases, the originals have already been sent back to their original owners or worse, destroyed, making proper re-scanning impossible.

The Heart vs. the Chart - an Interview with FamilySearch CEO Stephen Rockwood

November 13, 2015 Alison Taylor

**Stephen Rockwood, CEO of FamilySearch International, talks with us about the importance of family stories in genealogical research.**

It was a red-letter day for us in our career as personal historians: last week it was our great privilege to interview Stephen Rockwood, the brand-new CEO of FamilySearch International.

The idea of interviewing the leader of the largest genealogical organization in the world might have been just a teensy bit intimidating, but Rockwood immediately made us comfortable with his warm smile and easy manner.

Honoring Veterans and Their Stories

November 11, 2015 Alison Taylor

A chilly morning walk in the cemetery to think about those who served.

This morning, Tom and I bundled up for our morning walk and headed out to the beautiful cemetery overlooking downtown Salt Lake City. As we walked around the veterans' portion of the park, I was struck by the precision and order in the arrangement of the markers.

Ten Ways to Celebrate Family History Month

October 13, 2015 Alison Taylor

**It's October. Do you know where your memories are?**

Party time! At our house, Family History Month is a time to celebrate (and an excuse for me to stay up way too late messing about in Ancestry.com.) October is a great time to do a little bit of something toward preserving and sharing your family's history. Here are a few ideas:

1. Trace an ancestor's journey on Google Maps.

I have heard my whole life of the journey of my colonial pioneer ancestors, Thomas and Alice Armstrong, and their journey via flatboat from Pennsylvania to settle in the Ohio Territory about 1799. But I didn't have a sense of how far it was, or how long it would take. So I used the Create My Map feature in Google Maps, where you can make custom maps. Imagine how shocked I was when I realized that they would have floated right through downtown Pittsburgh (a thriving metropolis of 1,000 in 1799), where my daughter is living now. Just a year ago I stood on a bridge overlooking that exact spot, at the confluence of the Monongahela and Ohio Rivers, with no idea they had been there over 200 years earlier.

Writing a One-Hour Life History? There's a Better Way

October 7, 2015 Alison Taylor

My issue with this exercise is not the time limit imposed. (In fact, I think forcing oneself to complete something staggeringly complex in a very small amount of time has a laser-focusing effect that can be very helpful, whether your destruction is imminent or simply postponed.)

My problem with this particular exercise is what it tells you to write about in that hour.

Really? You only have an hour to speak (or forever hold your peace) - and you're going to list the names of your elementary school teachers?

Using Google Image Search to Find High-Res Public Domain Images for Your Book

September 25, 2015 Alison Taylor

Using Google Image Search to Find High-Res Public Domain Images for Personal History. This is a public domain NASA photo of my ancestor, Neil Armstrong, downloaded from Wikimedia Commons.

If you are in the process of gathering images to supplement your life story writings, you will generally be using photos from your own life.

But don't feel you have to limit the images in your book to what you have on hand. If you want to fill in some holes or jazz up the visuals in your project, there are a lot of places to get great images that are free, high quality, and don't trample on someone else's copyright.

Ten Keys for Telling Your Best Stories

July 18, 2015 Alison Taylor

From our keynote speech at the Riverton Family Search Center today: we are talking about ten of the most common obstacles people have when it comes to writing their life stories, and how to get around them! In a nutshell:

Curating Your Family's Historical Documents

July 16, 2015 Alison Taylor

**Your family's historical documents -- "Use them or lose them."**

"Use them or lose them." There is more to preserving your family’s history than tossing it into a cardboard box and handing it down to the next generation. Without context and “curation” —the careful gathering, sifting, selection, and preservation that takes place in any worthwhile collection—your family’s history can be lost to confusion or apathy as easily as it can succumb to dust or mold.

A letter signed by Abraham Lincoln, as anyone who has watched “Antiques Roadshow” knows, can be worth thousands of dollars. But such a document’s worth to us as a nation is far greater. Some of your family’s documents—letters, photos, diaries, ephemera—can be as valuable to your family’s history as Abe’s letter is to America. But do we treat our own with the same care and respect?

Google Photos with Free Unlimited* Storage - What's the Catch?

July 15, 2015 Alison Taylor

Google Photos will store all your smartphone photos and videos FREE. Is it too good to be true?

Book Highlight: Tribute to a Loving Sister

July 3, 2015 Alison Taylor

This is a good example of a tribute that doesn't take a lot of time or a lot of writing: a collection of a few memories, a few photos, and some family history that can be shared among family members.

February 28, 2024

Speaking at RootsTech 2024

We are so excited to be back at RootsTech live this year! Come by and see the Pictures and Stories booth (#1609) and see some of the many new books we’ve helped our clients create. Alison is giving two in-person classes: The Seven Deadly Sins of Building a Digital Archive, and Making a Genealogy Story Book. Hope to see you there!

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