We tend to celebrate everything in the twenty-first century, including birthdays and anniversaries. Friends are celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary soon and I wondered how and if our ancestors celebrated these milestones. Let’s look.

​It seems like we were in the middle of summer and now it is back to school and Labor Day Weekend!  I hope you have a great time with your family and friends with this holiday that marks the end of summer and the beginning of fall. For those who like to read more about it, here’s an article: Labor Day - Wikipedia
Happy Labor Day 2024!

I’ve been busy working on that family albums and have almost completed my update of information and photos. One of the positives of this time-consuming but rewarding effort is that I identified information that I would like to add to my collateral relative information. Also tied to this was the importance of organization and identifying family photos and artifacts. I can tell I have more work ahead. Let’s look at ideas for tackling these kinds of projects.

We all have them. Brick walls in our family research. Brick walls  come in all shapes and forms, from tiny garden fences for small missing pieces of our ancestors’ lives to giant brick walls that tower over our heads. There are resources to help us think of new ways to climb or go around those walls. Let’s look.

I haven’t talked about much about using AI for genealogy and perhaps we’ll delve more into that another time. In some ways we are already using AI with search engines and other tools. FamilySearch has an AI Experiment that you can try. Let’s look.

​I realize that most of my blogs are focused on researching and fleshing out information to help you write your family story. However, we all need inspiration in helping us do the actual writing. Let’s look at some writing tools and great sites/blogs that can help.

How can you write the story of someone’s life when you are dealing with boxes of pictures and memorabilia? How to even start? It’s a bit like the old adage of how to you eat an elephant. A bite at a time. Let’s look at some ideas to help us organize and get busy writing. Here are some thoughts.

​Do you remember the days of genealogy when we entered our data on Family Group Sheet and Family Tree Charts? All by hand unless you were a gifted typist and could manage not to botch entering your data. Now we have wonderful software programs where we can track and analyze our data. Do the paper forms still have value? Let’s look.

​I know we’ve talked about the importance of making digital copies of our photos as well as backups. I’ve been thinking more about family albums that I’ve created related to my family history. I thought I’d share some thoughts.

​Happy 4th of July! Hopefully, you took some time to spend with family and friends. And if you’re like many you might have taken additional time to take advantage of summer weather. Genealogy Gems is a newsletter from the Allen County Public Library at Fort Wayne, Indiana. Curt B. Witcher authored an excellent article called “Mud and Memories, Celebrations and Conversations, Files and the Future.”  He talks about recent natural disasters and the importance of scanning and saving our genealogy. And most importantly to start writing those stories about our family. While we think that all that data we genealogist collect is amazing (I am guilty of this too.), the reality is it isn’t until we write down our family history that it begins to have meaning to the rest of our family.
 
As you enjoy the summer holidays and vacation, think about how you can begin (or continue) to write down your family story to share with others. And enjoy the time you spend with your family and friends.
Happy 4th!
 
p.s. if you want to be on the Genealogy Gems newsletter, you can sign up here: :  www.GenealogyCenter.org. Scroll to the bottom, click on E-zine, and fill out the form. You will be notified with a confirmation email.