Many thanks to Charles Tingley for his overview of the collections available at the St. Augustine Historical Society. He mentioned the society’s online resources which are quite impressive. Want to take a look? You’ll find the online catalogs at https://sahs.pastperfectonline.com.
Are you looking for ideas to show off your family history at our Family History Faire in October? We will be posting suggestions in each Research Notes newsletter beginning today.
A sample Tumblr blog
Blogging has many advantages for family historians. One of them is that blogs have legs. What does that mean? Blogs are very search engine friendly, making it easy for others to find your blog. This includes cousins!
There are a number of blog platforms but my favorite is Tumblr. Not only is it a blog platform, it’s also a social network. Tumblr users are posting content on their blog and “following” other blogs they find interesting. Even better, it doesn’t cost you anything to publish, follow or comment.
How can you take advantage of Tumblr to share your family history with others? Think of Tumblr as a digital scrapbook. Post photographs, letters, clippings and even videos. Just add a paragraph or two to describe the stories related to them. Tumblr’s “social” elements have made it a popular network and being “search friendly” makes it easy for family and friends to find your blog.
A good place to get started is The Beginner’s Guide to Tumblr at Mashable. It tells you how to create your account, build your first blog, use the Dashboard and connect with others. It also shows how to use the free Tumblr mobile apps.
One other useful feature is Tumblr’s connection to social networks. You can easily set up your Tumblr blog so that each post you publish is also automatically posted to your Twitter or Facebook timeline. You can also post to MeWe.com but for now that is a manual process.
Want to get some ideas on how Tumblr users share their family history, research tips and other genealogical posts? Just follow the links below and take a look at those Tumblr blogs.
Do you need historical photographs to compliment your family stories? One very useful source for these photos is The Commons at Flickr. If you aren’t familiar with Flickr, it is a platform where Flickr members can post and share their photographs. Flickr also hosts The Commons where archives, libraries, museums and other institutions post photographs. Actually, it’s much more than just photographs. For example, the British Library has a huge collection of historic portraits, heraldry, maps, advertisements and images scanned from books. There’s lots of history in these and other collections found at The Commons. Even better . . . most all of these amazing historical collections have no copyright restrictions so you can use them to add “color” to your stories.
Flickr offers both a free and premium membership. Premium members do not have limits to the number of photos shared on Flickr, making this an affordable off-site storage solution to protect your photo collection from disasters. Premium members also get discounts on outside services like Adobe Creative Cloud, Blurb, Chatbooks and more. Flickr Pro is paid monthly ($5.99/mo) while Flickr Pro+ is paid annually ($49.99/year).
To learn more, visit Flickr at https://www.flickr.com. You will find The Commons under the Explore menu item.
Want to learn more about blogging with Tumblr or managing your photographs on Flickr? You will find this and more at the Storytellers Studio on MeWe.com. Storytellers Studio is a “selective” group. This means the group admin’s approval is required to join. This is done to protect group members from agitators. If you have questions or need help getting approved, contact Denise at sags.publications@yahoo.com.
A look at Storytellers Studio on MeWe.com
Great news just in from Dick Eastman . . .
Yankee Publishing Inc. (YPI), publisher of Yankee, The Old Farmer’s Almanac, and New Hampshire magazine, announced its acquisition of Family Tree magazine from F+W Media.
Final Notes
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Sample of the “fine print” at the bottom of each post.
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