Sorting Sunday

A great place to start doing genealogy is with photos.  Sort through your photos as well as photos your relatives have. Scan them! Even old slides!   Photos can tell a 1,000 stories about someone's life. When I was very young, we use to go to our family farm up in Watton, Upper Michigan.  My Great Grandpa Altonen would ALWAYS show us pictures. He would go to the cabinet (which is now in my house) and pull out boxes of photos. He would show us the newest ones he might have received from family in Finland.  These photos were always very interesting and can tell a lot about a person or place where they were taken, or even the time period.

Sometimes there would be "X" over the head of people, this indicated that that person was now deceased.  He would point out every time which were his siblings or nieces and nephews.  He was very proud of his photo collection.  I have some of those photos now scanned into my computer.  In the color photo, my Great Grandpa is the one with the hat on, and the rest are his siblings in Finland, when he went there for a visit in 1973.

These are some of the photos he use to share of his family in Finland 

Some Genealogists choose to  make their family trees with just photos or some with photos and mini stories.  When this is done, it is very visual, and a nice way to show off your family finds, without having to write a long story.  You can create a great time line of one's life with photos.  Here is an example of my father Roy.  

Course I can continue, but you get the idea of how this tells a little story.  I don't even have to give you a description but you can paint the life in your head a bit.  When you do the older generations photos, you really can pick a lot out from the photos about that person and the kind of life they lead.  

From this picture of my grandma on the farm, you can obviously tell  what is going on!

This photo is of my Great Grandfathers brother's family in their travels.  You can pick out where it was taken about, and the era by the type of clothing being worn.  

Next time you are at a relatives house that has old photos, go through them.  Make sure you look at the backs too because names and dates were usually written on them.  Ask about unusual markings, like my Great Grandpa's famous "X" over the head!  You can discover some interesting stories! When you start scanning, start with a plan. Don't do a massive scan and then try to sort things out later because you'll have an epic mess on  your hands. Sort as you go.  Make your folders first on your computer. I suggest surnames and then have sub files in those by main person in the family. This will make things easier for you when you go to find something or to post something at a later date.  Name the file with a  year in it if possible, this will help you later when you want to do a time line. That is one mistake I made!  Even ask relatives such as Great Aunts and Uncle for photos because you will be amazed if they had someone who loved photos like my Great Grandpa did, you may find some photos you've never seen before!  I would also suggest that because computers can crash and you don't want to do scanning twice.  Get a flash drive or external hard drive and back up all your stuff, it will save you later on possibly!  Happy sorting and happy scanning!