5 Ways to Save Your Stories
The holiday season is upon us! How did you spend your Thanksgiving? Were you with family? Did you record the stories shared?
The holidays are a wonderful time to gather together with family and friends, share stories and photographs, and make new family memories. Are you saving these memories and stories? Here are five ways to save your family’s stories and memories.
1. Use Sort Your Story to create profiles on your ancestors and living family members. Record the stories you hear within the profiles. Add photos and documents to enhance the stories.
2. Encourage children to become involved. Give them a disposable or digital camera and let them take lots of pictures of family gatherings.
3. Have a family writing activity. Give each person a sheet of scrapbook paper and a pen. Ask them to write a favorite family story.
4. Create a memory jar and fill it with slips of papers with discussion topics such as Christmases past; favorite ornament; family recipes; family traditions; and any other topics you wish. Pull a topic out of the jar and talk about it. Record the conversation with a video camera or digital recorder.
5. Start a holiday journal. Pass it around during the holiday season at family gatherings and ask people to write their favorite memories. You can add photos and other things to the journal if you wish. Then store the journal with your holiday decorations and bring it out next year.
These are just a few ways this holiday season to record your family memories. Do you have others to share?
© 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
Follow Friday – September 28, 2012
Here are a few blog posts and website articles we found interesting this week. Please let us know what you think.
We Are Family – Ancestry.com Can Prove It
The In-Depth Genealogists’s The Joy of FaceBook
The In-Depth Genealogist’s State Resources Page
Adventures in Genealogical Education’s New Book – Becoming an Excellent Genealogist: Essays on Professional Research Skills
GeneaPress’ Announcing Call For Papers – 2013 Genealogy Jamboree
And, for those who homeschool their children, check out Mascot Manor’s Travel Tuesday: State Study- Georgia and New Jersey Did you know Sort Your Story software is great for families and public schools to help teach genealogy and genealogy organization?
© 2012 Lorel Kapke, 19201 Sonoma Hwy. #341, Sonoma, CA 95476-5413
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A Day to Remember, September 11, 2001
Today is the anniversary of September 11, 2001. Where were you that day? What were you doing? How did you feel about the events that transpired? What stories from that day and the people who were affected do you tell? Are they written in Sort Your Story or your genealogy database?
Please share with us your thoughts about 9/11.
© 2012 Lorel Kapke, 19201 Sonoma Hwy. #341, Sonoma, CA 95476-5413
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