• Jewish Genealogy Value Pack, with video classes on Jewish names and finding Eastern European origins, Jewish and Eastern European research guides, and the must-have Finding Our Fathers guidebook

• Ultimate Irish Genealogy Collection, with video classes on Irish censuses and genealogy websites, our guide to Griffith's Valuation, a genealogical atlas and our Family Tree University Independent Study course on researching in Irish records

• Digitize Your Family Photos Value Pack, with guides and video demos for organizing, digitizing, digitally repairing and sharing your old family photos

• Photo Detective Collection, with photo-research guides from Family Tree Magazine's Photo Detective Maureen A. Taylor—including her new Family Photo Detective eBook and an autographed copy of Preserving Your Family Photographs

• Photo Retouching Digital Value Pack, with DIY guides and video demos for repairing faded, spotted and torn family photos

• Photo Detective Collection: Contains the Family Photo Detective ebook by Maureen A. Taylor, Digital Photography Essentials Family Tree University Independent Study course, and more
• Amateur Photo Restoration video class
• Genealogist's Essential Scanning Kit: Contains our Top 10 Scanning Tips for Genealogy download, Digitize Your Genealogy Documents video class, and more

• Determine whether you have a daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, cabinet card or other type of image
• Use clothing, accessories and hairstyles to help date the image
• Research photographer imprints
• Compare facial features in multiple photos to help identify individuals 
• Interview family members for information
• Use photo props and background to add context

• Advice on scanning old family photos—from Family Curator Denise May Levenick, author of How to Archive Family Keepsakes: Learn How to Preserve Family Photos, Memorabilia & Genealogy Records
  
  
• How to use Facebook as a digital home for family history and photos, from Tyler Moss, online editor for Family Tree Magazine
  
  
• Tips for using digital photography to capture current family memories, as well as for preserving old documents and heirlooms, from Family Tree University's Digital Photography Essentials course
  
  
• Recommendations for organizing and scanning your documents and photos from Family Tree Magazine publisher and editorial director Allison Dolan

• Ancestry.com has released a new Ancestry Facebook app that helps you use Facebook to add to your Ancestry.com family tree. The app lets you use your Facebook credentials to log into Ancestry.com, get hints about Facebook members who may be family, add family members on Facebook to your Ancestry tree and send copies of your tree to those relatives (which they can use to start their own trees on Ancestry.com). Watch a video of how the app works and get the app on Ancestry.com.

Note that when you add information from Facebook to your Ancestry.com tree, you grant Ancestry.com permission to use the information according to its Terms and Conditions and Privacy Statement.

• Our Photo Detective Maureen A. Taylor's book The Last Muster: Images of the Revolutionary War Generation, will soon become a historical film! Visit LastMusterFilm.com to learn more about the project and how you can help the stories of the book's subjects come to life through a donation to the Center for Independent Documentary.

• FamilySearch is holding a Genealogists Say "Thanks!" video contest. Submit a video sharing an ancestral find in FamilySearch indexes and thanking FamilySearch volunteer indexers for their work. Five winners will each receive  a $25 Visa gift card and have their videos published on teh FamilySearch indexing Facebook page. The submission deadline is November 5; see the FamilySearch blog for contest rules and other details.

• British genealogy website Genes Reunited has added a Keepsafe feature where the site's members can store digital copies of their family records, photos and memories. Keepsafes can be public, private or shared with select others.  Also new are Relation Profiles, where members can view and edit details about people in their Genes Reunited family trees. Check out the recently revamped Genes Reunited here.

• Genealogists familiar with French Canadian family heritage won't be surprised by Ancestry.com's latest famous-roots discovery: Canadian celebrities Justin Bieber, Avril Lavigne and Ryan Gosling are related through a family connection going back 400 years. The Biebs is also 10th cousins three times removed with singer Celine Dion. You can read more about how these stars are linked and see it charted out on Ancestry.com's blog.

1000memories, founded in 2010, has a website where people can store and share digitized photos. Shoebox, the site’s accompanying mobile app for iPhone and Android, lets you use a cell phone camera to “scan” and upload documents to the site.

The app has been downloaded more than 500,000 times since its launch.

Ancestry.com has already begun incorporating the app into its services. To mark this announcement, 1000memories has launched a new version of ShoeBox for iOS (iPhones), enabling Ancestry.com members to post photos directly to ancestors profiles in their Ancestry.com member trees.

“This is the first step in a broader plan that will see tighter integration of the two services in the coming months,” according to Ancestry.com’s official press release.

• What items you should digitize
  
  
• How to deal with fragile and oversized items, as well as heirlooms you can’t scan (like our bridal basket)
  
  
• Tips for creating digital copies of your photos and documents
  
  
• How to archive and organize digital copies for your own research and for posterity
  
  
• Key terms and online resources for digitizing heirlooms

• This weekend concludes National Park Week, when you can visit the 397 sites in the US National Park System for free. That includes plenty of history-themed parks, including Dayton (Ohio) Aviation Heritage National Historical Park, the Homestead National Monument of America near Beatrice, Neb., San Antonio Missions National Historical Park in Texas, and Fort Point National Historic Site in San Francisco. Visit the National Parks Week website to get more details and download a pocket guide.
  
  Start planning now for the next National Park freebie day, June 9 (in honor of Get Outdoors Day).

• New York City's Department of Records has debuted a photo database with 870,000 historical images of New York and its municipal operations.
  
  The pictures come from the Municipal Archives collection of more than 2.2 million images. Most in the online gallery are color photos of every city building in the mid-1980s, but you'll also find crime scene images from the police department, and more than 1,300 Depression-era images taken by photographers of the Works Progress Administration. (Note the gallery doesn't include the 720,000 photographs of city buildings taken from 1939 to 1941.) Read more about the collection and see a sampling of images here.

• Registration is open for the Illinois State Genealogy Society’s (ISGS) Fall Conference, Oct. 19 and 20 in Rockford, Ill. Nine genealogy experts will lead more than 15 workshops on topics such as “Breaking Through Brick Walls” and “Discovering the Real Story of Your Immigrant Ancestors.” Friday will also feature youth workshops. Visit the ISGS website for more details or to register.

We're hosting a free webinar next Tuesday about one of the most talked-about photo-preservation tools in genealogy: the Flip-Pal mobile scanner.

Presenters Thomas MacEntee and Diane Miller will show you:

• tips for using Flip-Pal in your genealogy work
• hints for archiving family photos with Flip-Pal
• how Flip-Pal can help you share photos with your family
• how to download the webinar presentation and slides for your future reference

Registered attendees will get access to the webinar to view again as many times as they like (we'll e-mail instructions after the webinar).

Plus, all registrants will receive a special product offer!

The free Flip-Pal webinar is Tuesday, March 27, at 2 p.m. Eastern (1 p.m. Central, noon Mountain, 11 a.m. Pacific).

The presentation is about 45 minutes, plus 10 minutes for Q&A.

Click here to register for our free webinar Flip-Pal Mobile Scanner for Fabulous Family Photos.

In addition to hearing fascinating tales of participants' old family homes with kitchens constructed from peach crates, cheese packaging used for insulation and old newpapers as wallpaper, I got tips for researching the cigar store and other ancestral homes, such as my great-grandparents':

And I smuggled some tips from the chat to share with you all! (The conference participants can download chat transcripts to keep.) Here they are:

• If the house is relatively new, Marian suggests starting with deed research. "I've researched every house I've lived in, even one built in 1985," she typed.

• Start with the book and page number of the property deed in county or town records. Many areas have property assessor records online, where you can search by address. Then you'll trace the deeds to find out names of the previous owners.

• City directories are a great tool for house history research, especially for multifamily dwellings or those with with renters.

• Most Sears and other "kit" homes are near railways, because that's how they were delivered. Most were built in the late 1800s to early 1900s. Check your local library for books on kit houses, such as Houses by Mail: A Guide to Houses from Sears, Roebuck and Company by Katherine Cole Stevenson. 

• You can get a historical contractor to walk through your house and 'read' it. "That is your best shot for knowing when the various parts were built," Marian suggests.

• One participant asked whether it's possible to research a house that's been torn down. "Absolutely," Marian replied. "The deeds and tax records never disappear (well unless there's a fire in the courthouse or something)."

• A chat participant named Helen shared a link to the New York City Department of Records website, where you can order a photo of any home on the tax rolls in 1940.

•  Another chatter named Barry mentioned how he found online Sanborn fire insurance maps for the area where he lived in San Francisco. These maps have details about the businesses and types of structures. Sanborn maps exist for many areas; they're also online for Cincinnati.

• Marian provided links to the Library of Congress' bird's-eye view maps and to her blog post about the top 10 best places to find old photos of your house.

• She also suggested looking for old photos at local historical societies and in the Images of America books by Arcadia Publishing. (I was lucky enough to find my great-grandma's house in an Arcadia book.)

If you missed the Virtual Conference, the 15 video classes (see a few of them listed here) will be available soon at ShopFamilyTree.com.

And if you're particularly interested in house histories, we also have a digital download guide to researching houses in ShopFamilyTree.com.

You can make sure the answer to these questions is yes by taking the latest Family Tree University Power Course, Picture Your Family History.

In this one-week course, you'll learn how to:

• How to analyze photos for clues to discover your family history
• How to use those clues to learn when and where the photo was taken, and who might be in it
  
• How to scan photos to get the best possible digital image
• Tips to rescue worn, torn, scratched, faded or moldy images
  
• Free online photo editing tools you can use to digitally repair photos
  
• How to repair damage to facial features in your family photographs
• Where to get help when you can’t do it yourself

Power Courses give you two intensive hours of learning you can immediately use to solve your family history problems. In the time it takes to watch a movie, you can become a better genealogist. 

Click here to learn more about the Picture Your Family History Power Course. Don't forget to use promo code FTU2011 to save 20 percent on your registration.

The photo above shows my great-grandfather and my grandmother in about 1930.

The Shoebox scanning app helps you digitize, organize and share collections of photos from the past.

You use the camera on your iPhone to snap a picture of a photo. Shoebox auto-detects the edges of the photo, then crops and straightens it. You can add information such as dates, names, and locations, then upload the photo as a JPG to 1000memories.com. There, you can be organize and share your pictures.

Of course, the quality of Shoebox "scans" depends on the phone's camera. If you have the latest iPhone, the 4S, your digitized Shoebox photos will be on par with what you'd produce with a typical desktop scanner, 1000memories cofounder Jonathan Good told me. The 4S has an 8.0 MP sensor for high-resolution mobile scans, as well as an improved f2.4 lens for quality lower-light scans.

Good says he also gets excellent results using his iPhone 4. The app is compatible with all previous iPhone models, as well as the iPad.

An Android version is coming soon, Good added (to the delight of this Android user).

“The popularity of the iPhone camera has proven that people want something that’s quick, accessible, and easy to share,” says 1000memories' other cofounder, Rudy Adler. "For us, that’s what providing a social mobile scanner is about - making it as easy as possible for people to get their photo collections digitized and shared with the people they care about.”

It'll certainly make scanning a box of photos quicker, and it'll be easier to digitize photos in your relatives' possession—no need to persuade Aunt Bertha to let you cart her precious album home.

Note that the app outputs a JPG file, but the TIF format, which creates uncompressed files, is the most widely used type of file for digital master photos. That lack of compression is also why TIF files are large and impractical for electronic sharing. So you may want to create TIF backups of important pictures.

Go here to learn more about Shoebox and download it.

Each day at 4 pm ET (3 pm Central, 3 pm MT, 1 pm Pacific), we’ll announce the winner of that day’s giveaway. Plus, each daily prize will be on sale for a fantastic price.

Congratulations to the winner of today’s giveaway, our Amateur Photo Restoration Virtual Conference video class: The lucky person is Paul Bing.

He'll learn how to digitally repair worn, torn or moldy photos—no photo editing experience required, just the free online tools and easy techniques demoed in this 30-minute video.

And the deal is: Get the Amatuer Photo Restoration video class for just $15.

I love the idea of using the instructions in the video to digitally restore a photo, then printing and framing it, and giving it as a gift.

The price is good until midnight ET today, Oct. 18. Click here to get the deal!

The daily giveaway for tomorrow, Oct. 17, is our Internet Archive Virtual Conference video class, with Thomas MacEntee's secrets to tapping into digitized historical books and other ancestral artifacts at the free Internet Archive website. Click here to sign up now on our Daily Deal & Giveaway page. (Note: Even if you signed up for a previous giveaway, sign up again to put yourself in the running for this one.)

Then just come back here tomorrow at 4 pm ET to see if you’ve won (and check out the Thursday deal). Good luck!

• Archives.com is sharing an interesting infographic for Family History Month, showing US immigration numbers through the years and stats on the origins of immigrants from 1910 to 1919 and from 2000 to 2009, among other information. Check it out on the Archives.com blog.  

• The Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy (SLIG), taking place Jan. 23-27, 2012, is having a contest for genealogy bloggers. Just blog about why you would like to attend SLIG before Sat., Oct. 15 at midnight (Mountain Time) and you could win free tuition. See entry details here. 

• British genealogy site GenesReunited has added more than 35 million baptism, marriage and burial records for England and Wales dating back to 1538. The parish records include Boyd's Marriage Index 1538-1840 and Boyd's 1st Miscellaneous Series 1538-1775, supplied by the British Society of Genealogists. You can view the records on a pay per view basis or Genes Reunited Platinum members can add one or more of the record sets to their package.

• Blogger Dick Eastman wrote about a neat site called Old S.F. with 13,000 historical San Francisco photos plotted on a Google map. Read Dick’s post here and visit the site here.
  

• The Federation of Genealogical Societies announced its new board members and directors, including George G. Morgan (Family Tree Magazine’s Document Detective columnist) as Vice-President Membership, Curt D. Witcher as Vice-President Development, Loretto “Lou” Szucs as Director, Kim Kasprzyk as Treasurer, Polly Fitzgerald Kimmitt as Director, Angela Walton-Raji as Director and Randy Whited as Director.

• The National Genealogical Society also announced a new board member: Teresa Koch-Bostic, of Mineola, NY, a professional genealogist in addition to her extensive background in business.

A bunch of you chimed in with advice, encouragement and stories that’ll benefit other overwhelmed family archivists. The gist of your advice is:

• Take your time. Baby steps!
  
• Sort by family, people or place.
  
• Digitize.
  
• Archival storage.
  
• Share.
  
• Consider donating what won’t be kept.

Here are some more details from your suggestions and stories. To read the full comments, go to Allison’s “Organizing Grandma’s Archive” blog post and click Comments at the bottom. 

• Claire suggested making an inventory of the items: “Tackle one box a week. Label the first box 1, the second 2, etc. Go through the contents and list everything in a notebook under the appropriate tab. For example, in the Anderson-Dugan tab, you might have:
  

John Dugan birth certificate, box 1
Photo of Anderson family reunion 1930, box 1

"At some later date you might relocate everything to a better storage system," Claire adds, "but at least for now you'll know the contents of each box.”

• Joseph Martin would allow more time: “I count 15 boxes in your stack. Give yourself two months to sort and organize one box. In less than three years, you will be done.”
  
  
• Renee advises scheduling small chunks of time (30 to 50 minutes) a few times a week, so things don’t feel overwhelming. “I wouldn't begin to move things around until you document how the documents appeared, since what folder they were in or what they were next to can have bearing on the meaning of the document. I would take photos of the box and each item in the box as you unpack them.”

She also recommends digitizing as you go. “If you re-create the folders and boxes digitally, you'll always know the exact order they arrived in. You can then tag them or make digital copies and reorganize them according to your preference. It will make you familiar with what's there and you won't have to reorganize the actual papers. You can just store them (or toss, if needed) and work with the digital copies.” 

• Patti McElligott describes her system of 3-inch binders for each family name, with each family member on a tabbed index sheet. Paper records for each person go inside clear sheet protectors behind his or her tab.
  

Patti’s tip for labeling photos: “Take a stack, and anytime you are sitting down, write on the back the who, what, where etc. There are pens made for this that will not damage the pictures.”

• Cheryl Hughes was also left with an archive like Allison’s, but from several different relatives and families. She’s been working on it for 10 years. “I still get boxes, as I am thought of as the 'picture person' of all these families,” Cheryl says.
  

She separated papers from the pictures, and had some of the old photos and tintypes restored and copied. “I am copying all pictures to CDs or SD cards and having prints made to share with other family members … the originals are in safe, acid free boxes, with copies in albums.” 

• Micki Gilmore’s inherited archive is smaller. “I plan to digitize. There are some great scanners out there,” she says, and plans to tackle one box at a time.

• Diane Hart has been digitizing photos all summer. “The photos are on discs, and then I view them on a slide show on my computer. They look so nice! … From photos I received from my 83-year-old aunt, I made a disc for her with a very nice identifying label, printed a thumbnail photo gallery of disc contents, and included my contact information. Then I drove miles to deliver this to her, and we watched the slideshow. She absolutely loved it! She is the only living child in my Dad's family of 13.”

• S. Lantz is using Clooz software to keep track of her archive. “[It] allows you to tag names in your genealogy name list with each item (photos, census, documents, books, etc.). If you assign a unique number to each item, you can run an individual report that will list all of the items tied to that individual.” 

• Juanita Dean uses photo boxes and tabbed dividers to organize her photos by place, then event. “If you look at the photos yearly, put them in a larger box that is handy to share for reunions, otherwise use archival boxes to put them away.”

• I love Ardith Hale’s words: “The Chinese say you can move a mountain one spoonful at a time.” She advises Allison catalog and digitize, then sort.
  

“I have been given a huge store of pictures, which we went through with my mother to assign names, then sort by family. Each family gets theirs. Older ones are being digitized, copied and spread around so that hopefully somewhere there will be a copy. Unidentifed ones are kept together in the hope that some reunion or gathering can attach a name.”

• Shasta says “Take your time, think of a plan, and execute it slowly, a little bit at a time … I managed to scan our family photos by doing a few each day, a little extra when I had time.”

Got a photo mess like this one on your hands? Old, unlabeled family pictures spilling out of shoe boxes, falling out of albums and deteriorating in the attic or basement?

Show us your photo mess, and you could win a safe place to store your family photo archive, plus expert photo preservation advice from Photo Detective Maureen A. Taylor 

To enter, submit a picture of your photo mess along with a short plea (fewer than 150 words) convincing us why you need photo-organization help. You can submit your photo and short story either of these ways:

• Post it to the Family Tree Magazine Facebook wall (like our page, then tag us when you upload the photo to your profile)

• E-mail it to us.

Family Tree Magazine editors will choose the entry displaying the worst photo mess and the most-convincing plea for help, as well as two runners-up.

One grand-prize winner will receive $250 worth of archival-quality photo-organization supplies and a signed copy of the book Preserving Your Family Photographs by Taylor. Two runners-up will each receive a signed copy of the book.

We’ll announce the winners in the March 2012 Family Tree Magazine. The entry deadline is Aug. 31, 2011. See more Photo Organization Contest details here. 

• Canadian subscription site Ancestry.ca, in partnership with The British Postal Museum and Archive, has added a database of Post Office Appointment Books, 1737-1969. The 1.5 million records name British Post Office employees, including the “femails” who kept the office open during wartimes. (These records also are on Ancestry.com.) 

• Our local Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County has launched a website that lets you explore the first panoramic image of an American city (Cincinnati, of course). You can zoom way in on the daguerreotype to see remarkable detail of storefronts, steamboats, streets and more along two miles of the city’s Ohio Riverfront. Click yellow markers on the image for pop-up windows with information about places depicted.

• British genealogy subscription site FindMyPast.co.uk, with the Society of Genealogists, has added a Business Index Collection listing Britain's shopkeepers, businessmen and women, and captains of industry from the early 1890s through 1927.

• The new Black Sea German Research site is for those tracing families who migrated from Germany, Alsace, Poland or Hungary to the Black Sea region of South Russia (now Ukraine) in the early 1800s. Search a database of names, upload your GEDCOM and share historical information at this free, volunteer-run site.

• NBC is re-running “Who Do You Think You Are?” season 2 episodes Saturday nights this summer. Check your local listings if you missed an episode or want to watch your favorite again.

I had a picture I snapped of Leo with his dad printed on canvas (that’s why there’s a shiny spot on the left side of the picture—it’s the flash reflecting off the canvas), so it resembles a painting. I took advantage of a great sale at CanvasPeople.com, but other photo-gift sites such as Shutterfly and Snapfish can do this for you, too.

The frame (minus the glass and backing) came from our local Michael’s store, and the canvas is hung from a picture hanger tapped into the canvas stretcher.

You’ll get more ideas for displaying family photos from our Family Photo Essentials CD. 

We also suggest family history-themed gifts in this free “Giving Trees” article on FamilyTreeMagazine.com. 

• Family chart-printing service Generation Maps has changed its name to Family ChartMasters to better describe the company’s services. Visit the website at FamilyChartMasters.com. 

• The AARP is holding a sweepstakes with genealogy prizes including a five-hour research consultation with professional genealogist Megan Smolenyak, signed copies of Smolenyak’s books, Family Tree DNA testing, an Ancestry.com subscription and a $1,000 gift card. You don’t have to be an AARP member to enter, but you do need to be age 45 or older. Click here to enter. 

• Genealogy wiki WikiTree has announced that Tami Osmer Glatz (who’s written articles for Family Tree Magazine including the January 2011 guide to FamilySearch Centers) is the site’s new Cousin Connector. Her role is to suggest merges between trees and improving the quality of merged ancestor profiles.

• Thousands of historical Massachusetts and New England maps from the Perkins Collection, the archive of a family-owned surveying business, is now part of Historic Map Works. Available as a home subscription and through many libraries, Historic Map Works links maps with geocode data so you can search them by modern address, keywords, town names, or year. You also can order prints from the site.
  

• A new photo gift site called Snapily lets you create photo greetings with 3D effects (you move the card and decorative illustrations look 3D) and flip-animation (you tilt the card back and forth, and switch between two photos). Visit the website to see what each effect looks like. Prices for photo cards start at $2.99. 

Photo Detective Maureen A. Taylor will analyze the photo for clues and blog about them on the Photo Detective blog (she’s already getting started here).

The winner also will receive the Digitize Your Family Photos Value Pack  (today’s the last day it’s available in ShopFamilyTree.com—learn more here).

Thank you to everyone who sent in your photos! You’ll see many of them popping up on the Photo Detective blog in the coming months.

• This month’s Ultimate Photo Preservation Collection sold out in record time, so we’re introducing another collection: the Digitize Your Family Photos Value Pack. Only during National Photo Month, you’ll save 69 percent on these tools to help you build a digital archive of your family's cherished memories:

1. Organize Your Family Photos independent study course download
2. The new Photo Rescue ebook
3. Photo Sharing 101 on-demand webinar 

Learn more at ShopFamilyTree.com. (Bonus: Order anything at ShopFamilyTree.com now through Monday, May 9, and get the "Memories of Mom" digital download from the forthcoming book My Life & Times by Sunny Jane Morton.)

• We're giving a free Photo Detective Live! half-hour webinar, Wed., May 18 at 3 p.m. Eastern time (that’s 2 Central, 1 Mountain and noon Pacific time). Photo Detective Maureen A. Taylor will address your questions about family photographs. Learn more here and use the “Reserve Your Spot” link to register. (When you submit your registration, you’ll also be able to submit a photo question. If you have a photo to go with your question, you can e-mail the question and photo to us.)
  

• Finally, watch this blog for news of our Photo Mysteries contest, starting next Monday, to get a chance to win an Ultimate Digital Photo Collection.

After firing up the washing machine, I sat down at my desk and wondered what I would do with all those JPEG jewels. Photographs capture once-in-a-lifetime moments and treasured family memories that we certainly don’t want to forget. But assembling them in a way that can be enjoyed for years to come is not as simple as it was in the old days when we sat down to our scrapbooks and prints.

Here are three tips for assembling your precious pics in a way that will delight you and those you share them with:

Go Interactive
Genealogy Blogger Mark Tucker recently emailed me a link to one of his posts on Zoom.it, a website that allows you to create interactive displays of your favorite photos. This is really slick for high-resolution shots that you want your audience to explore more in depth.

Here’s a Zoom.it of Hinchingbrooke House just north of London. If you’re a regular listener of my Genealogy Gems podcast, then you will not only know the significance of this house to the Cooke family, but also how incredible it is that I have any photographs of this part of our trip at all! (Hear the full story in episode 106.)

To learn more about how to use Zoom.it yourself and to see a great example of how it can be used with your own family history photos, check out Mark’s post Interactive Online Family History Photos.

Create a Photo Collage
When assembling a presentation of photos, sometimes less is more. By picking out the cream of the crop, you’ll ensure that your audience will stay enthralled.

But when it comes to creating a photograph collage with ShapeCollage.com, more is better After downloading all of my photos to my hard drive, I just went to ShapeCollage.com and downloaded the free software, navigated to the folder of photos on my hard drive and added them. By selecting Text and typing "WDYTYA” my photos assembled themselves in a creative way to tell the viewer what they were all about.

Video Slideshow
Video production software can also do a nice job of showing off your pics. Here’s my collection spanning the three days of Who Do You Think You Are? Live 2011. It’s the next best thing to being there!

• The New Jersey state archives has released a database of 3,427 New Jersey residents named on cards recording those who died in World War I. Your search results link to the original card, sometimes with a photo, and information about the deceased and his service.

• The Digital Library of Georgia, one of the December 2010 Family Tree Magazine’s 75 best state websites for genealogy, has added the Athens Historic Newspapers Archive. You can keyword-search or browse (by title and year) five newspapers published in Athens from 1827 to 1922. 

• The Illinois State Genealogical Society (ISGS) just unveiled a new website featuring links to ISGS records projects, links to other Illinois resources and a new members-only section. Visitors also will find archived ISGS Newsletters back to 2008, listings of Illinois genealogy events, free databases and more.

• A highly combustible nitrate negative caused the evacuation of the LDS Church History Library in Salt Lake City (not the same as the Family History Library) this week. You can read more about the incident, which ended with everyone safe and sound, on Dick Eastman’s blog. How do you know if you have any of these dangerous nitrate negatives (produced between 1890 and 1950) in your home? This Now What? answer will tell you.
  

Being a family historian, I of course plan to record all the baby excitement for posterity. But I couldn’t find any baby books I really liked—ones where I could include all the information I want, add pages and pictures, and save keepsakes. So I’ve been putting together my own, and I wanted to share it in case it inspires ideas for your own babies or grandbabies:

First, I flipped through baby books at the store and googled baby book pages to get ideas for what type of things I’d want to write down (baby shower info, the baby's “firsts,” etc.). I ended up relying mostly on these printable pages, customizing them to my needs. I'll add a family tree chart, too.

I and went to the store for a cute binder (not vinyl, which isn't photo-safe), some acid-free cardstock and polypropylene envelopes. Here’s the binder:

The polypropylene envelopes (red was all I could find) got hole-punched and hold cards and other mementos:

I set up the pages in Word with fonts and borders I like (leaving a wider margin on one side for hole-punching), and printed them on the cardstock to fill in by hand. (You could type everything, if you want.):

An envelope on this page keeps baby shower memorabilia:

I also can print photos to include. A couple of tips for expectant families: Scan ultrasound images because the originals tend to fade quickly. Also, a friend advised me to take some cardstock to the hospital because the staff might make extra footprints for me.

It’s not as simple as taking a quick snapshot, though. Before you start a genealogical photography session, create a shot list of the pictures you want. Here’s what we recommend:

Gravestones Shot List

• cemetery entrance
• whole cemetery
• stones of interest, with nearby stones
  
• the whole gravestone, showing the inscription and carving
• close-ups of the inscription and carvings
• any creative shots you want of the beautiful artwork and scenes in graveyards

Ancestral Homes Shot List

• the entrance to the street (a view your ancestor may have seen every day)
• the house with neighboring buildings
• the whole house (we suggest first knocking on the door to let the current resident know why you're taking a picture of his house)
  
• as many sides of the house as you can capture without trespassing
  
• interesting architectural details
• the yard
• any features mentioned in family stories (such as the tree Grandpa fell out of as a boy)

Heirlooms Shot List

• full view of heirloom
• heirloom with a ruler to show size
• all sides of heirloom item
• close-ups of interesting details, such as carving or painting
• close-ups of manufacturer’s marks
• close-ups of damage or other features affecting value

Records And Documents Shot List

• title page of film roll or book
• full record (be sure to get each page)
• close-ups of hard-to-read areas

• Civil War Genealogy Toolkit (free article)
• Researching Civil War sailors (free article)
• Civil War genealogy research guide in the July 2007 digital edition of Family Tree Magazine, available from ShopFamilyTree.com
• 101 Things You Didn’t Know About the Civil War by Thomas R. Turner, Ph.D.
  

• To mark next year’s sesquicentennial of the start of the War Between the States, we’re creating a special Civil War 2011 commemorative calendar. If you’d like your ancestor—male or female, adult or child—to be included, submit your Civil War photo to our Civil War Ancestors Flickr pool.

• We’re also creating a 2011 desk calendar of readers’ ancestral photos. If you submitted photos for our 2010 calendar, no need to resubmit them. You can add new photos to our Your Ancestral Photos Flickr pool.
  

• How did the DeadFred photo-reunion website get its name? 
  
  
• Can you get copies of materials from the Library of Congress (LOC) without being there in person? 
  
  
• If I get my DNA tested, does that mean the FBI can look at my profile and compare it to criminal cases?
  
  
• How many DNA markers should I have tested?
  

• The LOC is the largest library in the world.
  
  
• It has more than 60,000 genealogies from around the world.
  
  
• It has 20 million cataloged books.
  
  
• Its unmatched US city directory collection covers 1,200 cities, towns and counties across the country.
  
  
• The library building  has 20 reading rooms.

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• Finding Ancestors in the US Census: Online and Offline Research Strategies, taught by Jana Sloan Broglin
  
  
• Land Records 101: Using Deeds, Plats, Patents and More, taught by Diana Smith
  
  
• Tracing Immigrants: How to Research Your Family’s American Arrivals, taught by Lisa A. Alzo
  
  
• US Vital Records: Researching Births, Marriages, Deaths and Divorces, taught by George G. Morgan
  
  
• Reverse Genealogy: Working Forward to Break Down Brick Walls, taught by Lisa Louise Cooke
  
  
• Digital Photography Essentials: Techniques to Capture and Preserve Your Family History, taught by Nancy Hendrickson
  

• Scan a bunch of family photos and share them with relatives. Be specific— resolve to scan a photo every Saturday, for example. Learn three ways to speed up the scanning process.

• Organize your records—on your computer and in your file drawer—in a way that makes sense for you. Schedule 30 minutes once a week or once a month to file accumulated papers. (For serious assistance, consider our Organize Your Genealogy Life! CD.)

• Digitize your genealogy records and back them up online, on an external hard drive or on a CD. Read Dick Eastman’s post about online backup services.

• Back up your digitized photos, too (in the May 2010 Family Tree Magazine, we’ll recommend several photo-sharing websites for backing up family photos).

• Finally call great-aunt Betty and ask to talk about your family history.

• Pick a family and, for each place they lived, run a place search of the Family History Library online catalog. Copy information on any promising microfilm title.
  

Resolve to rent one title a month through a nearby Family History Center. You can get more advice on using FamilySearch in our FamilySearch Essentials Webinar recording.

• Go through your attic and closets and catalog your family heirlooms. You can use our heirloom recording forms to note the items' original owner, provenance, and other important information. 

• Commit an hour or so a week to volunteering for a records indexing project. Try FamilySearch Indexing or Ancestry.com’s World Archives Project, or see if your local library or historical society could use your indexing assistance.

• Join a genealogical society and/or attend a family history class at your library.

• If you’re a beginning family historian, resolve to search the 1930 census (the most recent one available) for every relative who was alive at the time. See our census search tips, and visit a large library to use census microfilm, HeritageQuest Online or Ancestry Library Edition.

• Christmas card sent in Alaska in 1938, from the National Archives’ Digital Vaults
  
  
• 1924 Christmas card featuring Abraham Lincoln, from the Library of Congress American Memory Collection. It won second prize in the National League of Women Voters’ world peace-themed Christmas card contest
  
  
• Salvation Army bell-ringer in 1903, from the Library of Congress
  
  
• Kids at a Christmas party, dated between 1910 and 1930, from the Denver Public Library
  
  
• Women decorating a Christmas tree in a factory, about 1904, from the Library of Congress
  
  
• Christmas tree lot in New York City, dated between 1885 and 1895, from the Library of Congress
  
  
• Nurses filling candy bags for children at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital in 1909
  
  
• Holiday crowds in downtown Chicago in 1927, from the Library of Congress
  
  
• Outdoor decorations in Denver, from the Denver Public Library

• Get familiar with your camera’s settings ahead of time so you’re not fiddling with buttons as the Kodak moments happen around you

• It’s easy to forget your camera when you also have to remember all the presents and the green bean casserole, so get it ready to go. Charge the batteries, find the extra ones and make sure there’s room on the memory card.

• Take a lot of pictures, trying the same scene zoomed in and out, and with and without flash. The beauty of digital photography is that you can look at the pictures later, decide what to keep and get rid of the bad shots.

• Get close to your subject to avoid background distractions.

• If you’re taking pictures of holiday lights at night, the flash can overwhelm them and harshly illuminate people in the foreground. Try switching to your camera’s nighttime setting—but you’ll also need to use a tripod or steady the camera against a fence rail or table to avoid a blurry shot. This article has more tips on tricky nightime lighting situations.
  

• Some digital cameras have a delay after you press the shutter, so you may need to anticipate a shot and click the shutter a split second early.

• Learn your camera’s timer feature so you can take a photo of the whole gang together. Position people at different levels (some sitting, some standing) and take plenty of shots to increase the chances of everyone’s eyes being open at the same time. This article has more tips on group portraits.
  

• Feeling creative? Here are some neat photo effects you can try with a digital camera.
  

• I love this list of holiday photo ideas for pets. Now I just have to find a box big enough for Janie to pose in.
  

• Professionals Critique Family Photos (free article)

• Photo Digitization Tips (free article)

• Family Photo Essentials CD with tips on taking photos, preserving them in albums, safely organizing them and researching old pictures (on sale at ShopFamilyTree.com)

• Photography how-to books from ShopFamilyTree.com
  

• Go to YouTube for a 3.33-minute video slideshow with photos from the inaugural Black Genealogy Summit, Oct. 29 to 31 at the Allen County Public Library in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. About 500 researchers attended the conference to learn about tracing African-American ancestors.

• Ancestry.com has a 5-minute video of some of the company’s leaders and other employees describing what happens behind the scenes to get records from archives to your computer. It’s a commercial, but interesting all the same.