Documenting the family history - Tips
Aviad Ben Izhak
Introduction
Whether you intend to write someone’s life story or try to assist a relative in searching the family history, you want to maximize your efforts and achieve the best result.
Attached are a few tips that might help you improve the documentation of your family history.
Please bear in mind the most common phrase “for years, I didn’t care and when I started caring, there was no-one left to ask”. You have the power to preserve the information and pass it on to future generations.
Research
Oftentimes, the information we possess is incomplete and/or inaccurate. It is highly recommended to check your “version” with other relatives. This is one of the best ways to reveal new and additional information, that adds important details we were not aware of.
Remember that people you can contact now will not live forever, so don’t procrastinate your research and data crossing.
I recommend uploading and saving all your results to a dedicated computer file.
Photos and more
All families keep photos of family members from their different stages in life. Sometimes, photos are not marked, so we are not sure who is in the picture and if a person that appears in one also appears in another, just from a different stage in life.
I recommend writing exactly who is in each picture, from left to right or from right to left, top to bottom, and state the order. If you have the information on when and where the picture was taken, state that too.
Paper albums might burn or wear-out, so scanning the important photos is highly recommended.
Some families even have voice recordings of family members, and it would be wise to save those in a digital computerized format as well.
Documents
Documents, certificates etc. have great importance. They contain exact and accurate information on events in a person’s life, such as place of birth, residence, marriage, death, etc.
When documenting your family history, try to recover as much meaningful information as possible from the documents.
Scanning the documents and saving them in a digital computerized format is highly recommended.
Sketches and charts
Many life stories contain information that was crystal clear to the writer, but with time passing by, the readers might find it hard to understand and make sense of it. For example, “my uncle Izhak was…” or “my grandfather Joseph used to…”
The reader will start wondering which side of the family did this uncle belong to? Was he the brother of the father or the mother? Same questions will rise on other people.
The best way to convey such information is using the following:
- Draw simple and clear sketches and the family tree
- Make sure the sketches depict the ties in a clear manner
- State important information regarding the people in the sketches.
Creating a family tree
Drawing your family tree on a piece of paper is complicated, limited and involves complex graphics.
There are quite a few programs that allow simple computerized and automatic design of a genealogy.
When coming to select a tool, creating the tree and taking all important issues into consideration, please see another article of mine under Tips to Creating a Family Tree.
It is always a good idea to upload the data to the internet in a computerized way.
Uploading the data to the internet provides the following benefits:
- Connection to data provided by other people
- Connecting and adding details from existing databases
- Exposure to remarks and insights of additional people
- Connecting and enrolling relatives to the documentation task.
Please remember the tree should be accessible to family members abroad, so it is recommended to keep all information in English, to better the communication with such relatives.
Databases
The following is a list of computerized tools that allow databases which include billions of lists from all over the world. Some are paid databases. If
you wish to expend your family tree, please take into consideration that charges might apply.
Nonetheless, there are free online databases, to name a few:
- ANU Museum of the Jewish People
- Yad Vashem
- Israel State Archives
Information backup and saving
As stated before, it is extremely important to organize all data and save in on a computer. Make sure you save photos, audio files, sketches, drawings, documents, text files, etc.
Computers are exposed to problems and viruses, so make sure you backup all your data, to verify it doesn’t get damaged to disappear. Consider saving a backup with another family member.
The author
The author - Aviad Ben Izhak (Lieutenant-Colonel), former commander of the Military Computer Science School (Mamram).
Specialist in creating genealogies and locating family members and roots. Seasoned in creating genealogies that include thousands of people.
Aviad is the founder of Yedaat – Genealogy and Family Trees.
All rights reserved to the author – names of products and companies are independent registered trademarks!
