Peek-A-Boo, I See You: look inside my life

Posted on April 22, 2015 by freshcron

Several years ago, my good friend and neighbor, Gary Petersen, told me that his journal contains everything, not just his words. After he explained his concept to me, I took it to heart and have made my journal a combination scrapbook, memory book, keepsake album, and journal. In fact, the only things that don’t go in my journal are pictures. I knew long ago that there was not enough time in this life for me to keep cute little scrapbooks of all the memorabilia, so my yearly journals take care of it all!

A small sampling of my journal pages

I keep my journal in – OF COURSE, a binder!!! I can usually squeeze the whole year into one binder, but there was one traumatic year in my life when I needed two! I use sheet protectors so odd-sized items can just be slipped right in and so I can see both sides of the cards I save. I start the year with an empty binder, fill it with sheet protectors, keep the binder right by my desk, then put things inside as they happen. When the year is over, my life is in the binder chronologically – and it is so easy!

I began this new way of journal keeping in about 2000.

So I picked a random journal from my shelf (2004) and besides my written journal, here is a sampling of what was in it:

The printed monthly calendar from my computer with appointments, etc.

My goals for the year – interesting to read, as they are always variations on the same theme

A heartfelt note from my California daughter thanking me for Christmas

A weekly update of events when individual days were a little too boring to write about

Closeup of a scarf my daughter made for me

An email from a friend about growing old

A certificate of achievement for completing a Power Point class

Thank you note for a genealogy presentation I gave to a group

Artwork the grandkids left in the playroom

A newsletter announcing our family reunion

The schedule from BYU Women’s Conference

Mother’s Day cards from my girls

A bridal shower invitation for a special young friend

A map of Sun Valley, Idaho from a getaway weekend with my husband

Confirmation itinerary for a flight to California with a daughter and granddaughter

The lab results from my blood test confirming low thyroid

A list of 12 items my oldest granddaughter requested for her birthday dinner

The “to do” list for an especially hectic week

Notes for my husband’s talk at the funeral for our friend, Mavis

A thank you note and picture of the VISA card a coworker gave me for Christmas

The playbill and ticket for Wonderful Town seen in New York City with my cousin and my daughters

A “sorry” note from 3 grandkids after they accidentally pulled a curtain rod off the wall

A note entitled “Grandma’s Apron” that accompanied a Christmas gift from a friend

The top news stories of the year in Utah and another list for the nation

Just looking through that one binder brought back a flood of memories, some good laughs, some tears, and several “ahhhs.” But I still think the most important thing to put in a journal is your own word – your thoughts, feelings, joys, sorrows, what makes you YOU! Your journal won’t be anything like mine because our personalities are not the same — and lucky for you! But at least this gives you a hint of what’s possible. Leave a record of your life so you won’t be forgotten in 50 years (or less)!

Peek-A-Boo, I See You: get a life

Posted on April 14, 2015 by freshcron

I heard a quote that within 50 years after a person dies, there is no more record of them. I have thought about that a lot. What will my great-grandkids know about me, if anything? What will my grandkids remember about me? What do I wish I knew about my great-grandmothers? If everyone had left a record of their life, I wouldn’t have so many unanswered questions, right?

So assuming most of you are commoners like me, I am going to do some posts related to things we can do so we will be remembered, starting with journals.

Modern journals can be purchased for as little as $3

When he was called to be President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1973, Spencer W. Kimball had 33 black binders on a shelf that contained his journals. He promised that if we kept journals and records, they would be “a source of great inspiration to your families, to your children, your grandchildren, and others, on through the generations.”

I took his advice to heart and in 1976 started writing in a journal. My journals have contained different things at different times in my life. Sometimes they are a way for me to work out problems. At other times they are spiritual records. And sometimes they are just normal or unusual events of my everyday life.

I write my journal on the computer, then put the pages in binders

I have had occasion to refer back to them to give someone inspiration, to settle an argument, or to recall a tender moment. President Kimball said your journal is your biography. “What could you do better for your children and your children’s children than to record the story of your life, your triumphs over adversity, your recovery after a fall, your progress when all seemed black, your rejoicing when you had finally achieved?”

And what do you write in your journal? According to President Kimball, you should record “your goings and your comings, your deeper thoughts, your achievements, and your failures, your associations and your triumphs, your impressions and your testimonies.”

I keep my journals in binders of course!

Can you even imagine if you had the journals of your grandfather who was born in 1757 in England, came here to fight in the Revolutionary War, and lived until 1839? Or what if you could read the journal of your grandmother who lost her husband in 1883 and raised her eight children alone in the western wilderness? Yes, some of those amazing stories do remain, but most are long lost, or have been retold so often that most of the facts are twisted.

Some old journals that I have inherited.

So, genealogists especially should know better than to leave this earth without leaving a record. And if you haven’t done it yet, it is never too late to start! Now that you have had your pep talk, the next post will give you some ideas of what might go inside a journal.

Lookin’ Good: a place for everything, everything in its place

Posted on April 6, 2015 by freshcron

I just have to give one more organizational tip before I go back to the real important genealogy stuff! I have so many little collectibles and books, etc., that it is hard to display it all without making the room look messy. After moving to our new home, my husband and I built a new “old” shelving system for my office. It takes up one whole side of the room and is about 10 feet long and from floor to ceiling. We bought new angle iron and metal fence posts and “aged” them to look old. The process took a few days of trial and error, but I love how it turned out.

DIY industrial shelving

Shelving all finished – ready to load

Oh Give Me a Home: where loose papers can’t roam

Posted on March 29, 2015 by freshcron

It’s time to organize some more stuff! This idea is extremely inexpensive and can be used in so many ways. It’s a cardboard magazine file from Ikea!

FLYT magazine file from Ikea

I didn’t know these little boxes could make my life so easy. I use them to store all of my piano music (organized by genre of course).

Piano music and scrapbook paper

I use them to store magazines that I can’t bear to throw away (chronologically of course). I use them to tidy up all those family histories my mother wrote (alphabetically by subject of course).

Family Histories

I use them to hold study guides and reference materials that I might or might never need again (labeled “General Reference” of course). I use them to hold all my junior high and high school yearbooks (times 2 because my husband has a set also).

Yearbooks from Days Gone By

I use them to hold my 8.5 x 11 scrapbooking paper.

Scrapbook Papers

I use them to hold my printer paper, photo paper, and page protectors. And I made my own larger ones to hold my 12 x 12 scrapbooking paper. The boxes are plain white, but you can see that I dressed up some of them with scrapbook paper and fancy lettering, just for fun.

You can buy them at Ikea for $1.49 for a 5-pack or order them online, but beware that shipping charges can cost more than the product. I ordered them from Amazon with free shipping, but had to pay a little more for the product. It was still cheaper than driving to the nearest Ikea, which is now 70 miles away from my home. Shop around, even on Amazon, and find the best deal.

And if you caught a glimpse of my newly painted, beautiful gray piano or my aged industrial shelves, stay tuned for a future post on those items!

Someone To Watch Over Me: hanging up the grandkids

Posted on March 24, 2015 by freshcron

I got so many compliments on my grandkid photo wall at our previous home that I wanted to duplicate it at the new house. The project took longer than expected because I had to reprint and recrop and paint the walls first, but it was worth the time.

96 photos of 8 grandkids

This is my step-by-step process:

Crop photos, change them to grayscale, then print in grayscale mode on glossy photo paper (I use a Canon Pixma color printer that produces a great quality picture). Sometimes the prints have a slight brown or purple tint to them, but they fade overnight to black and white. I print them as large as the paper and crop later to be the size I want.
My Canon Pixma MP510 color printer
Use spray glue to mount the photos to white foam core.
Use a sharp Xacto knife to cut the foam core to the desired size, positioning the face where you want it to be on the finished product. I found that when the kids were small children, their cute little faces were fun to crop in interesting ways.
Now that they are older, it’s all about the hair!
So I did less close cropping this time around. I cut all of my foam core to a 7″ width, but varied the length to fit the photo. You have to make sure your cuts are straight down and the blade has to be very sharp.
I painted the walls a dark gray to make the photos pop. I had some leftover gray and mixed it with some leftover black, so the paint didn’t cost me anything. In retrospect, I wish I had painted all the white walls in the office this dark gray. That’s another project for another day!
I am a big fan of reusable poster tack and always have a supply in my desk drawer. I am not sure which brand I use because it’s just in a big ball in a plastic bag! I do know, however, that I only like the blue kind! A trick for removing it from the wall is to use a small ball of it to rub on the unwanted part and it comes right off. Also, when removing photos from the wall, slide the photo so the tacky substance doesn’t pull off the paint (you can tell I’ve had a lot of experience!). I put a dot of the tacky stuff about an inch from each corner in case I need to slide the photo a bit to reposition.
When hanging the photos, if the space doesn’t work out just right, you can trim some of the length off and it all fits nicely. Just make sure you leave the photos the same width so it doesn’t look like a big mess.I love having my eight grandkids looking at me again while I work! Each one got 12 pictures on the wall. They are easy to change out because you just print a new photo and spray it on to the old one.

Now I just have to figure out what to put in the space above the window – I’m thinking 8 pictures of eyes only!

Diggin’ Up Roots: grandkids can dig too

Posted on March 16, 2015 by freshcron

I am always looking for ways to get my grandkids excited about my genealogy hobby. I shove it down their throats whenever possible! My granddaughter, Phebe, wrote a book about a grandmother named Phebe for a school project. She did a great job and I was proud of her effort to be involved in the family history.

My granddaughter, Phebe, standing by the headstone of the grandma Phebe Zundel Ward

I did hear of a few new ways to involve the grandkids at RootsTech.

One of the ideas was said jokingly, but I actually thought it was a good idea: make placemats of the family tree! It would certainly start a great conversation at Sunday dinner, don’t you think? I even found some examples at preservingheritage.blogspot.com.
Another idea came from a talk that referenced a study at Emory University involving the “Do You Know” test. I googled it and am going to use it in the near future, again a Sunday dinner gem.
Someone mentioned having the family do a life map activity. Each person would write down on a piece of paper as many “I remember” statements as possible within about 2-3 minutes. Then they could draw a life map using those statements. I want to do this and record the whole activity.
Also check out this cute Time Machine book at zap the grandmagap.com.

There are lots of ideas for involving those grandkids. I will post more as I find them. Am I alone in fearing that when I die no one will be interesting in furthering our family history?

Diggin’ Up Roots: the art of note taking

Posted on March 9, 2015 by freshcron

I am an Evernote lover. If that word is foreign to you, stop reading this post and download Evernote to your computer, your laptop, your tablet, your smart phone now! I guarantee you will wonder how you ever lived your life without Evernote!

The Evernote elephant remembers everything!

There were several good RootsTech classes on using Evernote, and Lisa Louise Cooke has good webinars for it, as well as DottoTech.

Without giving you a whole Evernote tutorial (you can find lots of them on youtube), I will just say that you can use Evernote for everything from basic note taking to digital genealogy files. When we “go to town” once a week for groceries, I am completely lost if I don’t have my phone with my list on Evernote. If I have a brilliant thought, even in the middle of the night, I reach for my phone and click on Evernote to record that thought. Anything I don’t want to forget becomes a note in Evernote. When I find and scan an ancestor picture, it goes into Evernote. When I take notes at RootsTech, they are stored in Evernote. If a friend tells me how to make her scrumptious blond brownies, the recipe goes in Evernote. You can save an entire web page with one click. These are some examples of my genealogy notes/files on Evernote:

Salt Lake City Cemetery Map

Ancestor Obituary from newspaper

Class notes

Cemetery photo

And best of all, no matter where I am or what device I have or don’t have with me, I can access my Evernote files. Your notes are stored in the cloud and you don’t have to worry about them. You can organize them in any way using notebooks and you can search by word if you lose a note in your filing cabinet. It’s like carrying my office around with me! My genealogy is at my fingertips as well as the most mundane items of my life.

Evernote is free unless you use too much space, but even at that I only pay $5.00 per month for all this peace of mind.

Seriously, it would take many long blog posts to outline the benefits, so just give it a free try and I know you will love it for storing your genealogy.

Diggin Up Roots: lost and found

Posted on March 3, 2015 by freshcron

This post is one I didn’t plan to write – until this weekend’s traumatic event involving computer and quick finger! Last year at RootsTech I was introduced to Backblaze. I had been using another cloud backup service, but Backblaze is only $5 per month for unlimited service, so I switched. I had lost a gazillion music files when my external hard drive just gave up the ghost a year ago, so I had already learned that lesson. Yes, I have a new external hard drive, but I don’t trust it, so letting someone else backup my computer was a better choice for me.

This weekend I had to rely on Backblaze and they came through. On Friday I temporarily installed a software program on my desktop for one of the grandkids. There were several icons installed. On Saturday, I wanted to get all of that software off my desktop and I saw the “uninstall” button and clicked on it (without really paying attention or reading the fine print). Suddenly, every file saved on my desktop was gone, lost for good! I know, I know, I shouldn’t have kept important stuff on the desktop, but I was accessing it every day, all day, and it was just easier – all of my blog ideas, pictures and instructions, but most importantly EVERY FILE on the children’s genealogy book I’m writing! I nearly had a heart attack! After frantically searching and determining that it was all really lost, I tried to do a system restore, but for some reason that failed – a couple of times. I was getting all kinds of messages with the words “corrupt, invalid, error,” etc.

Then suddenly I remembered – BACKBLAZE! My internet connection isn’t the world’s finest, but it’s all I can get, so it did take some time to restore those files, and I had to do it in small chunks, but finally this morning everything was found and is back on my computer, so I am very grateful!!! I am also making a reminder to back up my genealogy on my external drive at least weekly and especially before I install or uninstall any software.

So my message today is simple: Make Sure You Have a Cloud Backup! There are several services and many reviews written about them. Do your homework, pick one, and get some peace of mind.

Diggin’ Up Roots: pin-ups

Posted on March 2, 2015 by freshcron

Have you ever considered Pinterest as a research tool for your genealogy? I use Pinterest for projects I’m planning, things I see online that I don’t want to forget about, recipes, and other interests.

And at one point I did add a genealogy board, but then kind of forgot about it. At RootsTech, my memory was jogged, so I came home and did some pinning.

Some of my Pinterest boards

I was quite surprised at the genealogy information already on Pinterest. There are some great helps and ideas. I realized that I should keep “pinning” some of the images I use in my blog for those who love Pinterest, but have not yet discovered “Girl With a Past.”

If you are a fan of Pinterest, a genealogy board might be just the thing for you! Take a look at my Pinterest Genealogy Board and hopefully it will give you some ideas.

Diggin’ Up Roots: dig those stories

Posted on February 21, 2015 by freshcron

One of the most interesting events for me and my sister was to attend the Innovator Summit Challenge at RootsTech where four entrepreneurs presented their ideas for genealogy technology. It was done kind of like “Shark Tank,” but in a more gentle manner! All four of the ideas were so good that it was hard to vote for just one, but the audience was asked to do just that. The panel also voted. Each of the four participants was awarded a cash prize, but the grand prize winner was StoryWorth, a company based in San Francisco. The premise of their website is simple – “Each week, we email your loved ones a question about their life. All they have to do is reply with a story, by email or by phone. We save their stories on your private site and email them to your family.” It is a great way to get your family to write their stories and the first month is free. After that the pricing depends on the length of the service and the number of storytellers involved.

If you don’t want to use their service, it is still a great idea that you might be able to handle on a smaller scale with your immediate family. It would be more time consuming, but it could be done. Or just let StoryWorth do it for you!

There is a great story behind this picture, but only two people in the picture are still alive to tell it.

There are so many great stories buried in our families, and probably many of them will stay buried unless we make a goal to do something about it. StoryWorth is a great way to get started.

Girl With a Past

They call me Connie! Organizational Enthusiast, Genealogy Guru, and Midnight Busybody!

Author Archives: freshcron

Peek-A-Boo, I See You: look inside my life

Peek-A-Boo, I See You: get a life

Lookin’ Good: a place for everything, everything in its place

Oh Give Me a Home: where loose papers can’t roam

Someone To Watch Over Me: hanging up the grandkids

Diggin’ Up Roots: grandkids can dig too

Diggin’ Up Roots: the art of note taking

Diggin Up Roots: lost and found

Diggin’ Up Roots: pin-ups

Diggin’ Up Roots: dig those stories

If you don’t want to use their service, it is still a great idea that you might be able to handle on a smaller scale with your immediate family. It would be more time consuming, but it could be done. Or just let StoryWorth do it for you!

There are so many great stories buried in our families, and probably many of them will stay buried unless we make a goal to do something about it. StoryWorth is a great way to get started.

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If you don’t want to use their service, it is still a great idea that you might be able to handle on a smaller scale with your immediate family. It would be more time consuming, but it could be done. Or just let StoryWorth do it for you!

There are so many great stories buried in our families, and probably many of them will stay buried unless we make a goal to do something about it. StoryWorth is a great way to get started.

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