Video Genealogy

Show Your Family History

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Seeing Our “Old Folks” as Babies

A fun way to engage a younger family member in genealogy is to show that those ancient ancestors were once babies and kids.  Animoto makes it really easy to create a quick video photo montage with music and titles, like the one I posted here.  I admit I had way too much fun finding music and just watching the photos come together! I first encountered Animoto as an educator when I saw teachers engaging students with music and powerful images.  You can do a free trial and if you use this link to subscribe you can get one month for free.

The message here is HAVE FUN!

Want to use video to tell even more stories about your ancestors? I’d like to offer you two free tools to help you get started identifying stories and images for making a compelling video that will get your family’s attention.

Click below to download your free “2 Tools” worksheets.

Start Your Ancestor Story Video

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House Divided Joins Forces to Create Treasure Trove of Civil War Media

If you are trying to make videos about your American Civil War ancestors, head over to the Dickinson College House Divided website.  Dickinson encourages students to use images, audio, and music to create historical documentaries about the era from 1840-1880.  Multiple contributors provide a collection of sites filled with articles, videos, and links to resources for public domain music, photographs, and historical documents.  This is an especially valuable resource for teachers.

Going to the House Divided index at housedivided.dickinson.edu/sites/ is the best way to get an overview of what’s offered.  Use this project index page to navigate through this deep, detailed look at the American Civil War era, its media, people and events.

The answers to the Frequently Asked Questions on the project index page could take me down a rabbit hole (happily) for years:

  • Links and resources for public domain Civil War era music
    (which helped me to find music for my video, “Civil War Story of William Hunter Davis“)
  • Online sources for Civil War images (including, yee gods, the 6,000+ digitized photographs from the Matthew Brady collection on the U. S. National Archives site!)
  • Downloadable sound effects, including cannon fire, troops marching and horse galloping

One treat I found on the website was an article “Where was William Lloyd Garrison” by Matthew Pinsker, examining an 1865 photograph that provides wonderfully detailed images of people in a crowd listening to a speech by Henry Ward Beecher.  Pinsker identifies Union officer Robert Anderson and others in the photo and offers an updated identification of William Lloyd Garrison.

Henry Ward Beecher speaks, April 1865
Henry Ward Beecher, Charleston, South Carolina. 14 April 1864. “This pulpit of broken stone”

Okay, I confess, after mulling over Garrison’s image, I was equally intrigued by the details of the people in the crowd – distracted faces and relaxed body language you usually don’t see in portraits from that era, as well as the garments and hats.

If you find some images or audio you can use for your Civil War ancestor video story, add them to your Ancestor Story worksheets.  You can download the worksheets for free here.

Photo credits:
House Divided website, Dickinson College. 
Flag Raising Ceremony at Fort Sumter, April 14 1865. Library of Congress. Prints and Photographs collection. www.loc.gov.  Modified image accessed 30 October 2015 from http://housedivided.dickinson.edu/sites/blogdivided/ 

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Portals to the Past

Not unlike the DeLorean car in the movie Back to the Future, objects and artifacts can be time machines taking you back into your ancestor’s lives. Maybe you have your great-grandma’s coffee grinder or some odd office device that is almost mysterious in it’s purpose. But, if you can discover how it was used and the context in which it existed, it’s like using amazing time traveling goggles that let you see into your ancestor’s world. Just holding that artifact allows you to feel what they felt.

Atop my mother’s desk sits an antiquated stapler that came from my grandfather’s desk. Stapling papers takes on a new meaning, when I think that Grandpa may have used the stapler during the Great Depression when he owned an office supply and bookstore in Ocala, Florida.

The brown pottery pitcher sitting on my mother’s fireplace mantle triggers memories of my grandpa telling me the story of his mother letting buckwheat batter rest overnight on the hearth in that pitcher. He loved those buckwheat pancakes! That story gives new depth to my research about my great-grandmother and her ancestors.

You may own family heirlooms for which you don’t really know the backstory, which is why it’s important to pass on the stories you do know to your children. A short video of you or a relative telling the story of an object is one way to pass on the magic of artifacts as portals to the past.

Would you like some help telling that story with video? I’d like to offer you two free Ancestor Story Video Tools to help you get started identifying stories and images for making a compelling video that will get your family’s attention.

Click below to download your free “2 Tools” worksheets.

Start Your Ancestor Story Video

Have fun taking your family on a trip into the past!

Photo credit: Pixabay.com

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Search IS Powerful, But Not ALL Powerful.

picklejarman

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a librarian. I love searching databases. I enjoy the exercise of massaging search strings and subject terms. I thrill at getting a list of results with super relevant hits. But, if I only explore online image collections that have searchable indexes, or failed to just browse those collections, I would miss out on finding some amazing images I need.

 

Take the example of Ancestry.com—it is a collection of databases. You can search them all using their big front-page search box. But you can also pick a specific database, for example, City Directories, and search only those records. Or you could browse in the same way you would browse through the pages of the book. Instead of looking in the book’s index or table of contents, you flip through the pages (or screens) looking for items of interest or just seeing what strikes your fancy.

flea-market-464752_1280

 

Another reason browsing is important is because the terms you use to describe an image or record may not match the terms used in the index, so you could miss out on your target entirely. What’s a fun reason to browse? Anyone who’s browsed a flea market, a bookstore, or an online image database and found that amazing collectible, book, or photograph knows that feeling of serendipitous discovery. As if we were guided to that great find. Give it a try. Browse.

Go to the VideoGenealogy.in Resource page to find online image archives where you can practice your browsing. Enjoy!

Photo credits: Ryan McGuire, Pixabay; Stux, Pixabay