Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:

It’s Saturday Night again –

time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Here is your assignment, should you decide to accept it (you ARE reading this, so I assume that you really want to play along – cue the Mission Impossible music!):

1)  Almost all genealogists have family photographs and/or home movies of their ancestors, relatives, and friends handed down over the generations.  

2)  What steps have you taken to obtain, save and pass on those photographs or home movies to your family members?

Back in 1978, when I started my genealogy journey, one of the first things I did was to use a ‘copy stand’ to photograph family photos. Those copies were then printed and placed in photo sheets in a notebook. A notebook was given to my parents and each of my brothers.

Over the years, I’ve become the ‘collector’ of the original photos. From those photos, I’ve created a notebook for each of my brothers that contains any pictures that my parents or grandparents had of the brother or their family. At some point, my brothers will each receive their notebook of photos.

Since my grandmother Crawford was a collector of family photos and memorabilia, I inherited everything when she moved out of her apartment. While I don’t have every single photograph scanned, I have scanned the vast majority of those photos in my possession. Knowing that I have family photos that 2nd and 3rd cousins may have never seen, I’ve tried to upload those digital images as memories to FamilySearch.

By uploading the photos and document images to FamilySearch, I’ve made them available on a FREE website that other family members could easily access. In addition, I believe that FamilySearch will make the efforts to maintain these images into the future.

Unfortunately, I have a pile of photo albums from my mother that have not been scanned. These albums do not contain the older family photos. Instead, they contain vacation photos since their retirement and photos given to my parents by my siblings or my nieces and nephew. Since I don’t really care about the vacation photos and believe that the family photos are duplicates of photos owned by my nieces and nephew, I haven’t spent the time to digitize them. I’m hoping to sit down with my nieces and nephew to sort thru these photos to find the unique ones that do need preserved. That’s on a to do list for next fall.

Thank you Randy for this Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge and for the reminder to work to preserve the family photos in our possession.