FAMILY HISTORY TIDBITS By Wally Gray

Sharing our Links to the Past
by Wally and Frances Gray

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FAMILY HISTORY TIDBITS
By Wally Gray

Sharing Family History with Your Family

In past issues I have written about making sure we have some heir or person who is willing to take charge of our family history documents and information that we have compiled over the years including research notes, notebooks, computer programs (such as PAF), etc. My recent article “Have You Passed It on Before You Pass On” discussed that subject. See References below showing where my previous articles can be found.

This time I am telling you what we do (my wife and I) to see that our family members on both sides of our family know what we are currently doing as far as genealogy or family history is concerned.

A Christmas Project or Gift

For the past few years we prepared a three-ring notebook that includes emphasis on various areas of family information which we gave out as a gift at Christmas time. For the recent Christmas season we prepared a notebook that included among other things sections entitled “Crossing the Plains” and “Anchors Aweigh .” The first section included some of our ancestors who crossed the plains. We listed seven different companies that included the names of around 50 persons.

Where possible we included a picture of the company leader and a few words of description of how many pioneers, wagons, and animals were in the company. (We got this information from the Mormon Overland Travel site on the web which I described in an earlier newsletter called "Did Your Ancestors Cross the Plains?)

The other section chronicled some of our ancestors who came on ships, including one family who took a train. We had 13 countries represented. Usually each country was covered in one page which had a flag of the country on the top followed by information on the person or persons who sailed. In some cases we were able to get a picture of the ship from the Internet. We used our PAF program to locate ancestors who had come from foreign countries. These ancestors dated back to 1623 and included sailings in the 18th to 20^th centuries.

In earlier notebooks we included stories of particular families. In some cases we concentrated on just one recent ancestor.

Gratifying Responses

This year we were pleased to hear from many of our families (we sent out 25 notebooks) who enjoyed the project and said they were going to use the information for subjects of upcoming family home evenings.

In each case we also included a compact disk which contained a Gedcom of our latest PAF program

The advantage of these projects is that the families have some pertinent family history information in their personal libraries, even if they don’t take it seriously until years from now

Details of how to prepare the notebooks has been discussed in previous newsletters. In our case we did all the composing on our computer and did all the printing with our printer which allowed us to use lots of color. We found we needed factory ink jet cartridges rather than refilled or reconstituted ones to get the best quality of color. The ink cartridges were the most expensive part of the project. If you can afford it, you could have a local printer do the job. The printer can work from a compact disk.

REFERENCES

I have placed my newsletter articles on my web site at http://geocities.datacellar.net/wallygray25/

Just scroll down (on our home page) to “Family History Tidbits.” Articles that could help you with this project include “Producing Family Histories” and “Writing Family Histories.”

You also can find a link to Ann Lewis’s sketches on Turley and Bushman lines on our home page.