A recent seminar by Maureen Taylor, nationally known photograph expert, spotlighted new ideas and websites related to saving and sharing family photographs, as well as finding some that might have been lost.
Taylor stressed that if you are going to copy photos in a family album, make a photocopy of the entire album as it appears, so you know in what order the original owner placed the photos.
When looking for lost photos, ask how photos are inherited in your family. By the youngest child? Did they go to the step-kin?
When identifying or verifying any photos, always list who identified the picture and when they did so, in case later research brings up more questions. The younger females in a family group shot might be wearing the most current fashions and thus, by dating those fashions, you might be able to get a closer date for the photograph.
Mark a family tree as to which members you know you have photos of, and then seek photos of the others. If members belonged to a fraternal organization, or went to a school where photos were taken, you might find other photos by contacting those local organizations. Also, funeral homes are now making CDs of photos provided for a funeral and posting them online, so you might locate relatives and photos if you check funeral home websites.
Dead Fred is a free website where Joe Bott is posting photographs he obtains and tries to reunite with family members, so it never hurts to check the long list of 18,000 family names on www.deadfred.com. A similar site is www.ancientfaces.com.
There are lots of other ideas on Taylor’s website, www.maureentaylor.com.
Family websites and blogs
If you want to create a fairly simple website, some places where they offer a template or easy setup to follow are: www.weebly.com, www.wix.com or, to share family stories, you could try www.treelines.com.
You could instead work on a family-related blog at one of the free blogging sites. If you go to the Google-supported site www.blogger.com, you can easily start your own free blog. Another blogging site with more genealogy focus is www.geneabloggers.com.
Using either to share your information with others — and, especially, to record and preserve family stories — would be a good goal.
Surname directories
Finding others working on the same surnames is often difficult, although easier today with the Internet. Some genealogical societies offer members a chance to list their surnames of interest, one being the South Carolina society at www.scgen.org. It might be a good idea for your society to start such a listing.
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