Tuesday’s Tip – Holiday Videos and Cards Made Easy
Have your created your holiday cards, books and videos yet? Did you sort through your photo folders for that “perfect photo” of auntie, uncle, grandma, grandpa?
What, can’t find them through the many, many family photos stored within the “cloud”? No problem! Go to the Sort Your Story website and download your FREE Demo Sort Your Story software for both windows and mac! Next, download the Sort Your Story Companion Guide and get started!
In no time you will have created profiles for your ancestors and living relatives. You will have easily added stories, photos, and documents, and have everything organized. Then you will be ready to create your holiday cards and videos. Continue adding to the profiles and next year it will be even easier to create holiday keepsakes!
© 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
Are You Thinking About the Feelings?
I had a discussion recently with someone researching his family history. He was talking about a family member that died and the fact that the very next day, World War I was declared by the United States. He wondered what the family feltat that time. Their son had just died and now the world was turned upside down by war. This also meant their surviving son might be called up for duty and in fact, he was.
When you enter your facts, documents, and pictures into Sort Your Story, are you also telling the stories that go with those individuals? Are you considering the feelings behind certain events? These feelings are what help us to bring our ancestors to life.
Our ancestors are more than just names, dates, and places. They lived a full life and dealt with similar things as we do today. Consider how they felt and write that part of their story too.
© 2012 Lorel Kapke, 19201 Sonoma Hwy. #341, Sonoma, CA 95476-5413
Wisdom Wednesday – More on Identifying your Ancestors
Last week I talked about the importance of identifying people in your photographs whether they exist in an album, loose laying around the house, or on your computer in a file folder or Sort Your Story folders. This week I will expand a bit on this idea.
A goal I suggested for 2012 was to identify all the people in your photographs. Have you started this project? How far have you gotten? Do you have people you cannot identify? Here are some suggestions on ways to possibly solve that problem.
- Create a site on Google’s Picasa like the Italians in Chicago project has done. Notice how the blurb about the collection asks for people to leave comments about the photographs. You can do the same thing with yours. It is up to you whether you want to make this photo collection public or private to only those with the URL.
- Post photos on your blog with as much information as you can provide. Maybe you know the photograph was in an album given to you by your grandmother Rose Smith. So, one can theorize that those photos must be of her family or her husband’s family and not one of your other lines. That helps narrow down who some of the individuals may be.
- Print your Sort Your Story work as a book and show that book to all your relatives when you gather together. You may be surprised at how many photos are identified and how many stories you will hear. Bring paper and pencil with to record it all!
- Post your photos on FaceBook or Google+. Social networking sites can hook you up with potential family members so it never hurts to try this route.
My goal for you this week is to make a list of all upcoming family gatherings to which you could bring your photographs. Birthday parties, weddings, miscellaneous parties, even wakes and funerals. I have taken photo albums to wakes and everyone sits around to look through them, talk about not only the deceased but the rest of the family. Many stories are shared. Don’t rule out the sad events in your life that bring people together. Those are the times when people may be more willing to open up about things.
And as always, enter your information into Sort Your Story so your family history is more complete!
© 2012 Lorel Kapke, 19201 Sonoma Hwy. #341, Sonoma, CA 95476-5413
