Genealogy for Beginners: FREE Podcast Series

The FREE Family History: Genealogy Made Easy podcast series teaches genealogy for beginners with step-by-step, hands-on help at a friendly pace!

Genealogy for Beginners podcast family history

“Which podcast is best for beginning genealogists?” This question recently came from our reader and listener, Beverly.

It cued me to remind everyone about my FREE Family History: Genealogy Made Easy podcast! I created it for beginners to help them get started in a fun and easy way, and for more advanced researchers who want to brush up on their family history research skills in a step-by-step fashion.

Are you new to podcasts?

A podcast is like an online, on-demand radio show. You can listen whenever and wherever you want because they are recorded! Here’s a link to frequently asked questions about podcasts.

Get My Free Podcast – Perfect for Beginners!

To access the Family History: Genealogy Made Easy podcast:

1. Go to www.genealogygems.com

2. Hover your mouse over Podcast

3. Click on Family History: Genealogy Made Easy

4. Click the link for episode 1 entitled Getting Started (episodes are in numerical order.)

5. Click Play Now and then click the play button to listen on your computer.

6. You can also subscribe through iTunes here.

Get More Podcast Episodes, and Our App!

After you get started, enjoy the back episodes of the free Genealogy Gems Podcast for tons of additional ideas and strategies. The easiest way to listen is through the Genealogy Gems app available for Apple, Android and Windows.

More Gems: Genealogy for Beginners

We really want you to see Genealogy Gems as your guide through the fun and fascinating world of family history. That means in addition to our podcasts, we write loads of how-to articles just for you. To get instant access to all of our blog posts just right for beginners, click ARTICLES in the menu and select any article. On every article page there is a Categories menu. Click the down arrow, and click Beginner.  On your screen you will see all of our Beginner articles in chronological order starting with the most recent.

4 Beginning Genealogy Answers to Get You StartedFree Podcast

6 Sources That May Name Your Ancestors’ Parents

Try These Two Powerful Tools for Finding Genealogy Records Online: Google and FamilySearch Wiki

 

The Recommended File Formats for Long Term Preservation

You have precious family history files, both physical and digital. Have you ever wondered if they are in the proper form for safe, long term preservation? Consider taking a cue from the United State’s oldest federal cultural institution and the largest library in the world, holding more than 158 million items in various languages, disciplines and formats.

According to their announcement today the Library of Congress today released “a set of recommended formats for a broad spectrum of creative works, ranging from books to digital music, to inform the Library’s acquisition practices. The format recommendations will help ensure the Library’s collections processes are considering and maximizing the long-term preservation potential of its large and varied collections.”

The recommended formats can be viewed here www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rfs/ and cover six categories of creative output:

  • Textual Works and Musical Compositions
  • Still Image Works
  • Audio Works
  • Moving Image Works
  • Software and Electronic Gaming and Learning
  • Datasets/Databases

What I like about this recommendations is that they rank the various file formats on the digital side of things in order of preference. So even if you aren’t in the position to change your digital file’s format right now, you will know where it falls in the spectrum of long-term preservation.

For example, here are the recommendations for digital photograph files formats in the order of preference:Family History Photos at www.GenealogyGems.com

Formats, in order of preference

  1. TIFF (uncompressed)
  2. JPEG2000 (lossless (*.jp2)
  3. PNG (*.png)
  4. JPEG/JFIF (*.jpg)
  5. Digital Negative DNG (*.dng)
  6. JPEG2000 (lossy) (*.jp2)
  7. TIFF (compressed)
  8. BMP (*.bmp)
  9. GIF (*.gif)

Download the PDF of recommendations from the Library of Congress here

Genealogy Book Club: Facebook Chat and More Book Picks

genealogy book club genealogy gemsMany of you are reading (or have already finished) our Genealogy Book Club featured book for the quarter, She Left Me the Gun: My Mother’s Life Before Me by Emma Brockes. In the just-published November episode of the Genealogy Gems podcast, Lisa and I talk a little more about this fantastic book from the family historian’s point of view. We get a kick out of how she uses her mother’s dog-eared address book as a family history source.

What do YOU think of the book? On Thursday, December 4, we invite everyone to post comments on She Left Me the Gun on the Genealogy Gems Facebook pageWe welcome comments for a full 24 hours (12am-12am Eastern Standard Time, USA) for our worldwide audience. But we’ll monitor the page and give feedback from 9am-9pm EST. Emma Brockes herself hopes to pop in with comments and responses to your questions. (So start thinking of what you want to say!)

Genealogy Book Club Emma Brockes

Author Emma Brockes

Of course, I’m really looking forward to the December podcast, when you’ll hear my conversation with Emma about the book. Here’s my favorite quote from the interview:

“When [your] parent dies…your relationship with their history changes almost overnight. It suddenly becomes much more relevant to you because you feel like you are the only one left who is in a position to remember it. So having never wanted to know anything about my mother’s life, suddenly after her death it seemed imperative to me to find out absolutely everything….It felt to me that I couldn’t…stake out the parameters of what I’d lost until I knew everything there was to know about her.” -Emma Brockes, on She Left Me the Gun 

Meanwhile, we have two more books to recommend this quarter for our no-fuss genealogy book club, based on YOUR feedback:

One of our listeners, Mary, wrote to us about The Woman in the Photograph by Mani Feniger. She said, “I just ordered this book and thought you might be interested in reading it. I am looking forward to reading it myself.” Here’s a little blurb I found on the book: “Mani Feniger wanted nothing to do with the relics of her mother’s life before she escaped from Nazi Germany in 1936. But when the fall of the Berlin Wall exposed the buried secrets and startling revelations of her mother’s past, she was drawn into an exploration–of history and family, individuality and identity, mothers and daughters–that would change her life forever.”

 

And here’s a suggestion from Mike: “Here’s a book I found that you and your listeners might also enjoy. The Lost German Slave Girl by John Bailey recounts the story of a poor emigrant family and what happened to one of the daughters.  I found it fascinating.  The story is non-fiction and takes place around New Orleans in the first half of the 19th century.  There is much family research involved, some heart-wrenching descriptions of what the emigrants suffered, and delightful insights into the New Orleans of that time period.  It’s the kind of research that we family historians love to do but is more dramatic than many of the personal stories we work on.”

Mark Your Calendar: Thursday, December 4
We invite you to post comments on She Left Me the Gun on the Genealogy Gems Facebook page.

How to Create a Coloring Book for Family History

create a coloring bookColoring books are all the rage for adults and kids. Let this project and these free online tools inspire you to create a coloring book to celebrate your heritage.

Last Christmas, my mom Cheryl McClellan created a coloring book for our extended family out of family artwork. She requested copies of line drawings from every willing relative, especially her grandchildren (ages 3-20). Then she added her own childhood artwork, some of mine, and some of her mother’s, so four generations are represented.

create a coloring book

The flowers on the left, originally painted by my grandma, wasn’t as easily colored because of all the dark areas. My mom’s childhood drawing and my son’s, on the right, both made very “colorable” images.

Then she simply photocopied each page to make it into a coloring page. She experimented with the black-and-white settings until she got the best quality reproductions for coloring.

The grandchildren’s artwork came out the best because they created images meant to be colored (with lots of lines and spaces and no shading). The older artwork reproduced with varying degrees of success. But all were fun to include. She chose not to bind the completed book, so the pages would be easier to color, but instead put each person’s collection of coloring pages in large envelopes.

More tools and ideas: Create a coloring book

To create your own family coloring book, gather family photos (or artwork) from your family archive that would be interesting to color. Consider pictures of relatives, homes, heirlooms, or other objects of significance to your current family life or your family history. The best images will have plenty of contrast in them (lights and darks).

Choose your favorite free online photo editing tool, if you have one. Examples include Pixlr.com and Snapstouch.com. I chose Snapstouch because it’s super easy. Here are the instructions on Snapstouch:

1. From the home page, select which final visual effect you prefer: I chose Sketch. (Depending on the photo and the desired effect, you might also choose Drawing or Outline.)

2. Choose your image file from your computer.

3. Select additional options, as shown here. (In Sketch mode, you can choose a darker pencil sketch and faces to be refined).

4. Click UPLOAD. Wait for the file to upload to the site.

5. After the upload is complete, you’ll see the option to click SKETCH. Click and wait for a moment.

6. If the final image is not to your liking, play with the options (you don’t need to re-upload the photo to do this). OR switch to a different visual effect and experiment.

7. Click DOWNLOAD when you’ve got the image you want.

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