Organizing Preserving Your Heirloom Documents

Shows you how to safely organize, collect, and preserve diaries, memoirs, letters, papers, and memorabilia from your relatives and ancestors. You¿ll find instruction, advice, and tips that teach you how to: Locate missing documents, or discover documents you didn¿t even know existed; Organize your documents and the time you spend on them; Preserve and care for fragile, older papers; Transcribe, annotate, and illustrate documents; Conduct historical research; Create new family history documents by writing and interviewing your relatives; Find the org. that can help you work with your documents. Includes guidelines for documentary editing -- collecting, organizing, preserving, and pub. your family documents or the documents of others. Illus.

Shows readers how to safely collect, preserve, and even publish some of their most treasured written heirlooms.

Organize your family photos, heirlooms, and genealogy records In every family someone ends up with Mom's and Dad's "stuff"—a lifetime's worth of old family photos, papers, and memorabilia packed into boxes, trunks, and suitcases. This inheritance can be as much a burden as it is a blessing. How do you organize your loved one's estate in a way that honors your loved one, keeps the peace in your family and doesn't take over your home or life? How to Archive Family Keepsakes gives you step-by-step advice for how to organize, distribute and preserve family heirlooms. You'll learn how to: • Organize the boxes of your parents' stuff that you inherited • Decide which family heirlooms to keep • Donate items to museums, societies, and charities • Protect and pass on keepsakes • Create a catalog of family heirlooms • Organize genealogy files and paperwork • Digitize family history records • Organize computer files to improve your research Whether you have boxes filled with treasures or are helping a parent or relative downsize to a smaller home, this book will help you organize your family archive and preserve your family history for future generations.

A practical, down-to earth guide for streamlining your possessions and making time for the things that matter. Whether it's going from the multi-bedroom suburban house to the city condo, or from a country and city house to one cozy cottage, millions of Americans in the coming years will face the task of planning a shift to smaller or more practical quarters, paring down a lifetime of possessions and furnishing their new lives with things that have meaning. This simplification of surroundings and "stuff" will liberate people in mid-life to pursue their passions such as travel or hobbies without the responsibilities of a big house weighing them down. Rightsizing will be more than a handbook about the process of planning a new environment, jettisoning a lifetime's worth fo surplus household items, and moving painlessly into a more suitable space. It will also be the first comprehensive guide to the emotional passage that this winnowing process entails, providing a prescription for the internal hurdles that can easily sabotage sensible decision making.

Celebrate Your Family Recipes and Heritage From Great-grandma's apple pie to Mom's secret-recipe stuffing, food is an important ingredient in every family's history. This three-part keepsake recipe journal will help you celebrate your family recipes and record the precious memories those recipes hold for you--whether they're hilarious anecdotes about a disastrous dish or tender reflections about time spent cooking with a loved one. The foods we eat tell us so much about who we are, where we live and the era we live in. The same is true for the foods our ancestors ate. This book will show you how to uncover historical recipes and food traditions, offering insight into your ancestors' everyday lives and clues to your genealogy. Inside you'll find: • Methods for gathering family recipes • Interview questions to help loved ones record their food memories • Places to search for historical recipes • An explanation of how immigrants influenced the American diet • A look at how technology changed the way people eat • A glossary of historical cooking terms • Modern equivalents to historical units of measure • Actual recipes from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookbooks

Every family collects a lifetime of personal papers and photographs that tell the stories of their loved ones. The caretakers of these precious holdings inherit boxes overflowing with memories but are puzzled on how to even start to maintain or preserve their heritage. This book simplifies the principles and practices of professional archivists and curators so that anyone with a passion for their personal and familial history can apply these techniques to their family treasures. Based on archival practice, the book offers step-by-step advice that is easy, efficient, and economical. After reading this book, you should have a better understanding of how to organize your irreplaceable documents and preserve your rich family histories for future generations.

In every family, someone ends up with Mom's and Dad's "stuff" - a lifetime's worth of old family photos, papers, and memorabilia packed into boxes. This book gives step-by-step instructions for organizing inherited items in a way that honors the loved one while bringing peace to the rest of the family.You'll learn how to: • Effectively sort and purge boxes of your parent's stuff that you inherited • Decide which family heirlooms to keep • Donate items to museums, societies, and charities • Protect and pass on keepsakes

Practical, down-to-earth advice for family historians including: what to do before you go on the net, how to choose software, reliable websites, and evaluating evidence from original documents. Includes Courthouse, archives & library research and info on getting it all together (blog, book, CD). Chock full of real-life source documents from Myrt's personal genealogical research to help you see what's out there to prove family relationships.