Digitizing Your Family History
Over the last couple of years, tools for genealogists and family historians have made it easy and worthwhile to digitize your family history.
Why Is It Important?
There are a couple of reasons why digitizing your family history is something to consider.
1. Preserving family histories and photographs. There are countless stories about people who have lost precious family documents and pictures in a fire, flood or other accident/disaster. Would yours be protected or preserved if something happened to your house? Do you have a backup?
2. Sharing the family treasures. Many people have the only surviving copy of family documents and pictures that no one else in the family has. In fact, other members probably haven't even seen them or know they exist! Have you shared all of the family treasures in your attic with your relatives?
Maybe you now have a reason and motivation to digitize your family history.
How to Do It?
Now that you're interested, what are the steps you can take to digitize your family history? There are so many options online where you can upload pictures for very low cost. For example, photo-sharing sites like Flickr and Photobucket provide free storage for you to upload and share your pictures.
If you are looking for somewhere to share family documents and photographs, particuarly about ancestors, you may want to look at digitizing your family history with http://www.familyinhistory.com where you can add your information on individual pages for each of your ancestors.
Whatever service you decide to use, don't wait to digitize your family history because you never know when it might be too late!
Digitizing Family History Stuff on Amazon
Digitizing Your Family History (Family Tree Books)
Amazon Price: (as of 12/31/2009) 
Genealogy Online for Dummies
Amazon Price: (as of 12/31/2009)
Planting Your Family Tree Online: How to Create Your Own Family History Web Site (NGS Guide, 4)
Amazon Price: (as of 12/31/2009)
Links and Articles
1
FamilyPulse - Host Your Genealogy Website
Publish and host your family tree online and have more...1 point
2
Visualize Your Family In History
Easily publish your family in history online with more...1 point
3
Family History Search
Here's some useful information that might help you more...1 point
4
Genealogy Gifts Store
genealogical t-shirts, mugs, buttons and more...1 point
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Gift cards
Charity Gift Cards for recipient to select from ov more...1 point
6
The Unique Gift Idea of Charity - a knol by Charity Gift Certificates
We all have the same problem when deciding to buy more...1 point
7
Returning Family Artifacts
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8
Surname Meaning and Origin
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9
Gedcom to HTML Converters
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DNA testing for Genealogy
Getting a Y DNA test if you are a male is the best more...0 points
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http://www.topbudgetwebhosts.com
Top Budget Webhosts0 points
Online Family Tree Scrapbook
What You Need
First, you need to gather as much information as you can about the individuals you want to include in your scrapbook. A good starting might be 4 generations--you, your parents, your grandparents, and your great-grandparents. The vital information you will want is when and where they were born, married, died, and buried.
After you have the vital information, you will want to start collecting photographs. Go through your own pictures and pull out ones that relate to important events or reflect the personality of the person. Talk to relatives to see what pictures they have of your grandparents and great-grandparents--most family treasures are hiding in someone's attic.
Once you have photographs, think about which stories you will want to include in your online family tree scrapbook. For example, did your grandparents or great-grandparents immigrate from another country; did your grandfather serve in World War II; what occupation were your ancestors? Build a framework of their lives that you can populate with personal stories that you or other family members may remember.
Where to Make It?
Making an online family tree scrapbook is perhaps the easiest way to share it with your family. Though there are potentially many options, look for a website where you can upload your family tree, and then add pictures and stories about each individual (rather than just in one big group). FamilyPulse is one option where you can upload your genealogy (from a GEDCOM file), and then each ancestor has his/her own page where you can add pictures, stories, timeline events, and have dynamic family tree charts.
Encourage Others to Contribute
Once your family sees what you have created, they may want to share the stories they remember and the photographs they have. Encourage collaboration and your online family tree scrapbook will be a lasting legacy of your family and ancestors!
by genealogist
Hello! I really enjoy "the search" in genealogy and have recently developed a service, FamilyInHistory, to help people create genealogy web...
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