My Big Idea

One of the first hurdles I am facing with doing family history is how to keep track of all the stuff I hope to learn. I have put this "stuff" into the following categories:

• Vital information (Names, Date of birth, etc)
• Notes about sources (Ex. Where I found the sweet pic of grandma Miki)
• Stories (This may include transcribed journals, anecdotes taken from larger anthologies, personal interviews, etc)
• Pictures and other images (This is the cool stuff that everyone loves to see and really creates that emotional connection between us and our anscetors)
• Day to day research notes and the random stuff that I would usually jot down on an errant peice of scrap paper (Not very organized I know)

So where do I put all this stuff? I really really really want to be able to share the information that I find and be able to work with others on this giant beautiful tree of mine, so paper and pencil are out. I want everything to be digital so I can save it, send it, tag it, and never never require anyone else sit around typing up all my notes for posterity. Yuck!

This brings me now to the various digital options out there for family history. At the top of the list for me is the newly revised LDS genealogy site Family Search. I am excited for the direction that family search is headed and I think that it will be my best bet for collaborating with others on my family tree. I am also very excited about the new options for adding stories and pictures to the vital information for each individual.

As excited as I am about Family Search, I feel like it may not meet my needs entirely. For example, all my research notes (you know the ones that I jot down on the back of a envelope laying around). What do I do with all them? Do I use the old pad of paper (perhaps in a more organized fashion) and then stick my final product on family search? Or should I look for a way to digitize the entire process?

I am leaning towards the second and thus I come to the point of all these wandering thoughts. What if I created a family history website that would function as the digital pad of paper for all my research? Then all my family could use this website and we could see each others notes and progress before it hits Family Search. I also like the idea of a website because hypothetically I could design it to let me upload what ever I want (notes, pictures, video interviews, etc) and then we could link all of that back in to Family Tree. This would give me the freedom to record things with my own style and still standardize them for future preservation. 

My other idea within this idea, is to find a way through tags or some other means to use the stories of my ancestors to reinforce gospel principles. For example, I could do a search for tithing and pull up a story about Great Great Grandpa McBride and the time he was blessed for obeying the Law of Tithing. Cool eh? 

So these are my ideas and we shall see what becomes of them. For now I better figure out how to use Family Search and maybe even google "How to create a web page". Yikes!