How often do you wish you had letters, diaries or even just a note on the back of a photograph to give you more information about your ancestors than just their vital statistics? So what are you doing to give future generations a broader view of your generation?
Lynn Palermo at the Family History Writing Studio has a solution which she calls Legacy Journaling: Your Life Story Without Being Overwhelmed. Here’s how she defines legacy journaling:
Unlike lengthy memoirs that can be overwhelming and often dull because they are nothing more than a chronological outline of a person’s life, legacy journaling is comprised of short stories, vignettes and memories that share your life experiences one bite-sized nugget at a time.
Day One apps
If you are interested in legacy journaling, check out the Day One Journal app. It’s an impressive tool to help you capture your legacy. Day One makes journaling easy. When you create a new entry, Day One automatically captures the date, time, location and even weather conditions and saves it as part of your entry. You can take photos and include them in your posts or pull them in from your photos folder. Day One stores your writing as plain text which protects your journal from bit rot and insures that future generations will be able to read your stories.
Day One is available for iOS (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) and Android devices. There is also a desktop version for Mac. It uses tags (keywords) to organize your journal entries so the app’s search engine can quickly display all entries about a specific person, event or topic.
There is also a premium service ($34.99/year) which includes unlimited journals, syncing between devices, up to 30 photos per entry and access to new features like book printing.
Day One entry captured at a favorite restaurant.
Why is Day One so special? With Day One on your mobile phone, it’s always nearby and available to capture any moment. The entry you see here is from a favorite restaurant. So many special places in our lives no longer exist, but they can live on in our memories if we take the time to capture them with photos and stories. In this case, while I was mostly interested in the menu, Day One automatically captured the address, date and weather. It may not mean much at the time, but it will many years from now.
As you can see, Day One and your mobile phone make it easy to capture a special moment, a fond memory or the story behind an old photo. It can also be used to describe an old family photo or an interesting story your research discovers. There’s no concern about writing these stories in any particular order. Day One’s tagging feature makes it easy to pull out all the entries tagged with a specific tag.
Day One’s sharing features lets you share an entry by sending it via text message or email. You can also create a book from selected journal entries right from the app.
Legacy journaling with Day One gives you the opportunity to capture and share your world and your family with future generations. To learn more about journaling your family history, you’ll find a number of articles at Storytellers Studio.
FamilySearch – Where Families Live Forever
Tap photo above to view the video.
A PDF copy of Jack Butler’s presentation notes can be downloaded from the Speaker Handouts page in the SAGS Support library.
Last week Microsoft released a series of software updates to fix more than four dozen security issues – many of them rated critical – in Windows and other related software. Windows 10 users receive updates automatically, but earlier versions must have the automatic updates feature turned on. All Windows users can receive update alerts by turning it on in Windows Update.
From ScotlandsPeople (www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk):
More than 2,400 historic maps, plans and drawings from National Records of Scotland (NRS) collections have been made available on the ScotlandsPeople website. Many of the maps show the changing Scottish landscape over time. They also record where people lived or worked, so they can throw light on ancestors’ lives and even suggest new avenues for research. The maps and plans cover certain areas of Scotland, but not the wholeof the country. They include both country estates and plans of towns and cities, including for example Glasgow. Most of the maps and plans originate in the records of court cases, Scottish government departments, Heritors’ records, as well as in private collections gifted to or purchased by NRS. If you would like to find out more, read our maps and plans guide, or search the maps and plans.
Free Classes and Webinars for June at the Family History Library
This month’s classes are focused on Costa Rica, Germany, American West, Norway and Scotland. FamilySearch also offers weekly sessions on the FamilySearch Family Tree, Catalog, Search and Indexing. No registration is required.
If you are unable to attend a class in person or online, most sessions are recorded and can be viewed later online at your convenience. Access archived classes online at Family History Library classes and webinars.
Tuesday, 5 June, 12:00 a.m. EDT – Using the FamilySearch Catalog Effectively (Beginner) Webinar
Thursday, 7 June, 3:00 p.m. EDT – Using German Address Books to Locate Records (Beginner) Webinar
Tuesday, 12 June, 12:00 a.m. EDT – Tips and Tricks for Using the FamilySearch Historical Record Collection (Beginner) Webinar
Thursday, 14 June, 3:00 p.m. EDT – United States Research: Mountain West Region (Beginner) Webinar
Tuesday, 19 June, 12:00 a.m. EDT – Starting Family Tree: Attaching Sources (Beginner) Webinar
Thursday, 21 June, 3:00 p.m. EDT – Scottish Clans and Naming Patterns (Beginner) Webinar
Tuesday, 26 June, 12:00 a.m. EDT – Overview of FamilySearch Memories (Beginner) Webinar
Thursday, 28 June, 3:00 p.m. EDT – Finding an Ancestor’s Place of Origin in Norway: A Case Study, Part 1 (Beginner) Webinar
Recommended Reading
We are kicking off a new section to our weekly Research Notes. Recommended Reading points you to interesting articles posted in the genealogy blogs. If you find an interesting blog – or two or three – that you would like to follow, you can use a newsreader app to subscribe to the blogs you find interesting and have new posts delivered to you automatically. Interested? Check out Research Delivered – An Introduction to the Newsreader to learn more.
Here’s this week’s recommended reading:
Final Notes
Each new post published at SAGS Support is automatically emailed to member subscribers and/or delivered to their newsreader. Research Notes is published every Monday morning and other articles are posted during the week. Subscribers have the option to control how often these updates are delivered. Look down at the bottom of this message and you will find a Manage Subscriptions link in the fine print as you see in this example. Click it and you will be taken to the WordPress.com Subscription Management page. Use the Delivery Frequency column to change your delivery options from “Immediate” to either “Daily” or “Weekly”.
Sample of the “fine print” at the bottom of each post.
Also down at the bottom of each delivered post is a Comment button. If you would like to comment on something discussed in a post or ask a question, just click the Comment button and you will be taken online to the comment section of the post where you can share your thoughts and read what others have shared.
To learn more, download a copy of the SAGS Support Guide.
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