Family photos and their related stories have always intrigued me.
That’s a reason I became a photo coach in 1995. My passion is helping families safeguard their most meaningful memories.
Researching your family’s history and preserving it through photos, videos, documents and written anecdotes is a great way to keep your family story alive.
Here’s a peek at some of my digital albums organized by each family member. Can you find the album containing my early life?
Keep the memories and stories of your family alive into the next century and beyond using FOREVER®. It’s the most complete memory-keeping system that I’ve found.
You own your account, your digital home for your oldest and newest memories and it’s guaranteed to last a lifetime plus 100 years. The company’s design is to keep accounts safe and accessible beyond that time frame.
I’ll be glad to share more about the guarantee. Scroll down to contact me and set a time to chat.
Let’s look at what it means to research your family history.
Look Back
You want to look back and see what key stories you have available of family members. Your parents and grandparents are good places to start.
Do you know who their closest friends were and their challenges and how they lived?
Saving photos, videos, letters and other files help piece together their stories.
Look Forward
Now let’s look forward.
Start with you.
Compile your biography of where you were born, your hometown, or the places you lived in if you had moved.
Use your life to create a template that you and your children or other friends and relatives can use.
A good example comes from UCLA and their Center for Oral History Research. A link to the page is at the end of this post.
The focus is filling in early childhood, teen years, early adult years to later years.
Tell about your hometown and what it was like. Or if you moved a lot how did that affect you and how did you learn to fit in with other schools?
Answer basic questions like:
- Where were you born?
- Describe what your siblings were like. Who were you closest to?
- Describe the house you grew up in. Describe your room.
- What were your family’s economic circumstances? Do you remember any times when money was tight?
- What highlights of your life do you remember?
- Did you have favorite school subjects?
Why Use FOREVER®?
The company’s mission is clearly stated in its name.
FOREVER® offers cloud storage and that’s promised to be accessible for many generations to come as I mentioned above.
You own your account and you have various tools to use to preserve your family’s story. You can:
Digitize—printed photos, old files like VHS tapes, audio cassettes, and more
Store—this is permanent storage that you arrange in digital albums. You can label each album and tag photos with a person’s name like “Sharon” so any photo they’re in can easily be found among your digital albums
Print—photo books and gifts so your photos can be enjoyed in different ways all year round
Family history—FOREVER® has professional genealogists who can form a plan to guide you in researching your family’s history or help by finding hard-to-locate records. They’re skilled at handling issues due to language barriers in past decades and centuries.
I’ve had my family traced back to the Civil War era and a friend of mine has had her line traced back to the late 1500s in Germany.
Here’s a graph of records that FOREVER®’s researchers use.
Write your story
The saying goes that a picture tells a thousand words, but photos or videos with text give a more complete story.
Imagine one of your grandchildren’s grandkids accessing the digital albums that you created and wanting to learn about the people in the photos or videos. They have the images and in the margin they can read either a brief description or paragraphs that can be the length of a chapter.
You can actually use the photos and text to write a book about your family’s life.
Here’s a photo of a friend and photo coaching colleague, Patti LaMarr who worked for the phone company. In the 1970s, she trained briefly as a lineman. The photo is preserved using FOREVER® and you can see she writes in-depth about the photo in the right margin.
A link to her story is below.
And organize the albums so your adult children or other relatives or friends can add their memories in the future.
Bring your family’s story to life so it will last for years to come.
How may I help you safeguard your family’s history?
I work with families across the U.S. helping them digitize memories, store them, and create their family’s line.
Call me or email me if you have questions about researching your family and using FOREVER®.
Ph: (626) 323-8553
Email: melody@safeguardyourmemories.com
Discover more:
Patti LaMarr and how she saved her memories from the devastating Eaton Fire that destroyed her home and 6,000 others in Altadena in January 2025.
Her Home Burned, but Her Photos, Videos and Other Memories were Always Safe
Here’s the full post on Rori Grosse and her family line going back to the late 1500s.
How to Research and Store Your Family’s History for Future Generations
Here’s the link to: UCLA’s Center for Oral History