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 – October 19, 2012 Family History Month
October is Family History Month. What are you doing with your kids or students to encourage them to study their family history? Many resources are available to you both in the U.S. and around the world. Let’s look at a few.
New Zealand’s Family History Fair
About.com’s Family History Month Resources and Kids’ Craft Page
Cyndi’s List of Family History Month Websites
Homeschool Mosaic’s family history articles by Stephanie Pitcher-Fishman
Teacher Resource: Family History lesson plan
Are there other resources you have found to help create Family History Month programs or lesson plans? Please share with us in the comments.
© 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 thre
e 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!
