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Top 5 Reasons to Use Sort Your Story in 2013

The year is almost over and as we look back to see what we have accomplished, where we have gone, who we have met, and what we meant to do, it is time to make goals for 2013. Why not start using Sort Your Story in 2013 to organize your photos and documents? I’ll give you 5 reasons why you should.

  1. It is time to become super organized in your genealogical research. Sort Your Story will help you organize materials for each individual in your tree!
  2. You need to begin planning your family history book projects for 2013. Sort Your Story can help you prepare these!
  3. Children and grandchildren can easily become engaged with genealogy. Do you need to brush up on some genealogical skills or Sort Your Story expertise? Check out our Companion Guides for Windows and Mac.
  4. Everyone has a story that should be told. Write them in Sort Your Story so you can easily create family history books.
  5. Scan in old photos that have not been identified. Save them to an Unknown Profile. You can easily show these photos to family when you get together. Having these unidentified photos in one place will make it easier to locate and identify them.

So what are you waiting for? Check out Sort Your Story today and start organizing!

© 2012 Lorel Kapke, 19201 Sonoma Hwy. #341, Sonoma, CA 95476-5413

 

Write Your Family’s Story

Post written by Sort Your Story Founder, Lorel Kapke

For those of us who are not professional writers but want to share family stories, let me share how easy this can be achieved!

Enter information in Sort Your Story

Enter information on family members in the Sort Your Story Software. Add photos and stories.

Create a photo booklet

It was a few weeks before Christmas 2007 and I was preparing for my first family reunion held in the summer of 2008. I sorted through my Sort Your Story Kapke photo file (1800 and early 1900s) and found a few photos of my fathers family, many without names or dates. I created three “simple” photo booklets from scanned photos. In these booklets I included as much information as possible and sent the photo booklets to my father for Christmas.

Interview family members

When I prepared to interview my father at our 2008 Reunion, he pulled out his set of photo booklets and spoke for over an hour! I never had to ask one question! Arriving home, I created many short family videos from “one” interview and updated those “simple” photo booklets to a self-published book our family can enjoy many years to come.

A few of these video’s can be found on my Sort Your Story YouTube and Vimeo page.

Two videos in particular are of my fathers WWII experiences.  My project for this holiday season 2012 is to create a book of my fathers WWII experience; easy to complete as my fathers military photos and records are stored within my Sort Your Story photo and military folders.

Update Sort Your Story

The stories are available on my fathers Sort Your Story Profiler database. Organized all in one place!

Are you using Sort Your Story to record your family’s history? Have you created a photo booklet for your family members? If not, what’s stopping you? Organizing made easy, Sort Your Story.

 

© 2012 Lorel Kapke, 19201 Sonoma Hwy. #341, Sonoma, CA 95476-5413

Sort Your Story Demos Available

Did you know Sort Your Story has two demos available for its software? There is a MAC version and a Windows version which both come with a demo companion guide.

Do you already own Sort Your Story? There is a companion guide available for Windows. The MAC version will be out soon! Sort Your Story is the inexpensive, fun, and easy to use organizational software for genealogists available as a quick download at http://www.sortyourstory.com.

With the aide of the Sort Your Story Companion Guide, for Windows or MAC, you’ll quickly be up and running, organizing all of your documents, putting the puzzle pieces of your family history together.

The Sort Your Story software is comprised of two main parts: the colorful Sort Your Story Category Folders, providing you with 36 folders for sorting and storing all of your records and documents; the Profiler, a database and mini–word processor in which you input all of your data which works seamlessly with the folders.

This companion guide will walk you step-by-step through the set-up and use of Sort Your Story, and will show you examples of how to use each of the categories.

Check the demos and companion guide today! Let us know what you think!

© 2012 Lorel Kapke, 19201 Sonoma Hwy. #341, Sonoma, CA 95476-5413

Searching in the Census with a Surname

This post was written by Lorel Kapke about her personal research.

Searching in the Census with a Surname; can’t find ‘em but you KNOW they are there!

Searching the census for my great grandfather and family by surname in a small town would prove to be challenging. They are listed in the 1905 State Census and the 1920 Unites States Census. But where were they listed in the 1910 Census? I know they did not move viewing surrounding census records and other documents. Referring back to the (SYS folders) censuses  (see attachment) I quickly referred to previous and future censuses for the street names and neighbors who lived nearby. Paging through one or two census pages I found something I never thought existed, a census included  “location, relation, personal description, nativity, citizenship, occupation, education, ownership of home, but did not include names at all!  Written on the left side of the census page was the following message:

“Sheet made from cards already punched by order of Mr. Hunt- Feb 9 -11, Original sheet lost after cards were punched”.

Fortunately, they did offer enough information to peace the puzzle together.

I found three people living in the correct location, ages, birth year, place, race, gender, marital status, father and mothers birth place all added up to a match that is difficult to ignore.

Don’t let surnames get in the way, if you have your files in order, a simple review of an organized data can guide you through your brick wall!

 

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