Archiving Photography and Ancestry.com

Over the last few months, I've become immersed in ancestry.com.  So much so in fact, that I've became a paying subscriber.  It's a very interesting website and lays everything out for you in terms that's easy to understand.  You still have to do your research as much as possible with verifying family member's names, birth-dates, death-dates and that sort of thing, but in the end, this makes the process much easier.  What's really nice, is being able to connect with other members and access the information that other family members have put up.  It helps expand your knowledge of your own family tree, quicker, I think.

My great grandfather and great grandmother on my Mom's side

Before digital photography, most people had real albums for their photographs.  Albums you could hold in your hand and flip through.  And if you are like my wonderful Aunt Evelyn, you wrote people's names and dates on the back of those photos.  Now, if I could only get my memory to be as astoundingly awesome as hers.  But I'll get back to that in a minute.    


How far have I been able to trace back?  On my father's side, to the early 1600's.  On my mother's side, to the mid 1800's.  So far.  The search for more information, I've discovered, is a never-ending quest.  This isn't a short-term project, for sure.  


Am I related to anyone famous?  Yes.  Well, more like infamous and then later famous.  My 11th great grandfather was someone pretty darn savy.  But I'm not going to say who, yet.  I will tell you that he was born in England, where he became sought after by the Bishop for his religious teachings.  When I say sought after, I mean, he wasn't exactly on the Bishop's Christmas card list, if you know what I mean.  After leaving England, he came to our country and founded what would later become Hartford, Connecticut.  Like I said, savy.  I'll talk more about him in a later post.


Getting back to what I was saying about older photos...with the advent of digital photography, nobody writes on the back of their photos anymore.  Sure, we archive with hard drives, backup drives, rely on Flickr, or Picasa.  But how are you archiving them so that in 40 years, your kid's kids will know where those pictures came from, or what day they were taken?  After going through a ton of old photos in the last few months, proper archiving of the pictures I've recently taken, is becoming a high priority.  And trust me, the digital camera data that's embedded in the photo itself, isn't always reliable.


More later...