Hooray! Today is the first day of school—genealogy school, that is. When I was chosen as the Family Tree Firsts blogger a few weeks ago, one of the things I was most excited about was the opportunity to take online genealogy courses at Family Tree University. I promptly enrolled in two classes: Discover Your Family Tree: Genealogy for the Absolute Beginner (for obvious reasons) and Organize Your Photos: Preserve Your Family’s Pictorial Legacy because I have albums like this:
And boxes like this:
When you have four children, you tend to have a lot of photos anyway, although my youngest says none of them are of her. I maintain that I spent more on her senior pictures last year than on the other three combined, so it’s pretty much a wash. But when word gets around that you’re the self-appointed family historian, you tend also to become the accidental family archivist as well. And don’t even get me started on the state of my computer files!
I look at this way: Discover Your Family Tree will help me find stuff and Organize Your Photos will show me what to do with the stuff I find. Now where did I put my Barbie lunch box?
—Nancy
Family Tree Firsts is an ongoing blog series featuring newbie genealogist Nancy Shively of Skiatook, OK. Read all her posts at Family Tree University.