Who Will Tell Your Story When You’re Gone?
Of course, genealogy and family history is all about ancestry, but I noticed a definite product trend at Who Do You Think You Are LIVE for new products and services to promote preserving personal history.
Speaking Lives
Speaking Lives is a service that makes an audio recording of your family history as a CD or MP3. The company offers one to three hour interviews, or customized projects. Interesting service.
The Album People
If you are looking for a professional digitizing service for your photographs and videos, The Album People offer a unique and very personalized service. They will come to your home with their equipment and scan your family photos on site. This eliminates the worry of shipping and possible loss. Or, they will pick up your photos and do the work at their office. The final images are delivered to you on a flash drive organized into meaningful folders with logical, accessible structure. I spoke with the creator Elad Ben Elul for some time about the program and was impressed by his enthusiasm and service.
He emphasized that he designed the project to meet people’s needs — accessible photos and digital files. The service only starts with digitizing; they will add metadata tags and keywords, organize files in a folder structure, correct and enhance as necessary, and create beautiful digital slideshows of your images. Talk about full-service!
Lisa Louise Cooke (left) and Janet Hovorka book signing.
Lisa Louise Cooke and Janet Hovorka were right in step with the theme of preserving personal history. The steady flow of visitors at their stand showed a high interest in Janet’s new book Zap the Grandma Gap: Connect With Your Family By Connecting Them To Their Family History and Lisa’s books and dvds on using Google Earth to personalize family connections.
Autograph Books for Grown Ups
Genealogists love finding a diary or journal that belonged to our ancestor; but, are we doing our part to pass on our own life story? If facing a blank journal seems overwhelming, two new memory book series might be your cup of tea.
All About Everybody and From You to Me are two new companies creating personal journals designed to record personal history and life events.
Creators of the From You to Me memory book series.
From You to Me offers all kinds of individual and parent and child journals plus small card journals. The full-color illustrations decorate each page with journal prompts and questions. I looked at the book “Our Story: for my son” which has room for eighteen years of memories (six pages per year). The emphasis is on the relationship between parent and child, which seems different than some books more about recording events.
Journals come in two design series: one features a flowering tree with photos and the other whimsical hand drawings. The books are currently available in the UK, but are being edited for an American edition that will change “Mum” to “Mom” and exchange American English for British English.
All About Everybody creators.
A completely different kind of personal journal has been designed by Red Cherry Trading Publishing. The All About Everybody series is a kind of “autograph book for grownups.”
About the size of the large Moleskin journal, this series offers four books printed on high quality paper. Each features beautiful illustrations and is designed to be used a bit differently from a traditional journal or memory book. Val and Amanda Carpenter explained to me that they were inspired to make the book after finding a similar book owned by an aunt in the 1930s. Evidently, she passed her book amongst her friends and asked them to answer short questions about themselves. The result was a book that showed relationships between many people, not just the memories of the owner.
The idea behind the journals captured by imagination and I purchased two books: In My Family and On My Special Birthday. I love the way the type is large enough to read comfortably without my reading glasses!!! The books include questions pages for 40 people: two pages of short questions followed by two blank pages for photos, drawings, whatever. The birthday book would be a great gift for one of those zero years.
This post is part of a series about Who Do You Think You Are LIVE in London. You might also enjoy:
Meeting the Metropolitan Police at Who Do You Think You Are LIVE
very interesting
Thank you so much for mentioning our service! It was great meeting you 🙂