Celebrate Your Family History With A Photo Family Tree
Scan Old Photos To Digital, And Let Your Memories Take Root
As the makers of Guinness beer happily remind visitors to the brand’s Dublin museum, “everyone’s Irish on March 17th.” Indeed, St. Patrick’s Day is widely celebrated by Americans of various ethnic backgrounds, and annual St. Patrick’s Day parades in the U.S. date all the way back to 1737, when the first one was held in Boston. But for many Irish-Americans, St. Patrick’s Day is also part of Irish-American Heritage Month, which is a time to recognize and celebrate Irish history and family heritage. While many Irish and non-Irish Americans join in on the wearing of green and the merrymaking on March 17th, most of us miss out on the opportunity to explore and celebrate our family heritage throughout the month of March. One great way of doing this it to make a photo family tree on your computer.
To make a digital photo family tree, you can use ordinary photo-editing software such as Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, or Paint Shop Pro, or you can go with a purpose-designed software such as Family Tree Maker 2010 from Ancestry.com, which costs about $30 and includes a subscription to Ancetry.com’s enormous database of over 7 billion historical records. You can even search for your relatives and ancestors in the world’s largest online collection of family history resources, and use the information you find to help construct a larger and more accurate family tree.
Whichever software you use, you’ll need digital photos of everyone in your family tree. For your kids, that means reaching for the closest digital camera. For grandma and grandpa, you’ll probably need to scan some old photos to digital. If you have your own photo scanning equipment, you can scan them yourself. If not, you can send whole albums (or even boxes!) of photos to a professional photo scanning service like ScanDigital. When choosing the best photos for grandparents, great grandparents, and older ancestors, look for photos that you think they would want to represent them. It is usually best to use photos from young adulthood; if everyone is around the same age in all the photos, it is easiest to see family resemblances. Also, a photo of grandma and grandpa from the 1950s might be more interesting than a photo taken at Disneyland last summer.
The biggest benefit of using digital photos is that you can’t accidentally damage or ruin your old one-of-a-kind photos in the process. Once you have your photo scanning all finished, you’re ready to make your tree. If you plan to go back several generations, this might involve some research. Talking to older relatives is a great way to gather information about your ancestors. When you’re ready to put your tree together (and if you are using your own photo-editing software), you might want to consider downloading a family tree template from a digital scrap-booking outfit like Scrapgirls.com. Once your family tree is complete, you can have it printed out, or email it to family members. It’s a great way of celebrating your heritage, and it’s something that both kids and adults will find genuinely interesting.
