Have an old-fashioned Christmas this year.
How?
By researching your family history and piecing the history together with brief, written descriptions and your collection of photos and videos.
I’d love to have Christmas photos of my parents and grandparents from the World War Two era and earlier. But like many of us, I don’t have them. So I’m charting history with this photo of me when I was 9 months old.
Don’t you love how we draped the trees with tinsel?
This is now an old-fashioned Christmas memory–I was 9 months old
Sure, you can still have your blown-up snowman, nativity scene, or Santa with reindeer in your front yard while Christmas songs blast not-quite commercial-free from your radio or off YouTube. But try to pause the frenzy and don’t worry about the “perfect gift.”
Give your family the gift of looking at Christmas past like this photo from 1965 when my sister and I visited Santa.
The Santa tradition continues
All Christmas Memories in One Place
These are now historic photos and are in the same place as the photos and videos that I’ll upload this year using an app on my phone. I can bring all the memories from past Christmases onto one platform that I use for Christmas in the future.
I use FOREVER®–the best solution for photo and video preservation I’ve found in my nearly 30 years as a photo coach.
Try it yourself with 2 free GB of storage space. You’ll see how to upload your favorite photos and create albums.
Let’s look at just two of the many benefits:
- Photos from traditional scrapbook albums
- 8mm home movies
- Slide shows
- VHS tapes
- Handwritten letters
Storing files permanently—guaranteed for a lifetime, plus 100 years and beyond.
We’ll look at more benefits below, but let’s see how you can tie your files and family history together.
Reasons to Look Back on Your Family Christmas History
FOREVER® helps us store our most meaningful memories while researching our family history with professional researchers.
Holiday celebrations are important traditions and help define a part of who we are.
Someday, my grandchildren’s grandchildren will enjoy this photo of me and my children picking out Christmas trees
The digital age has made DNA testing more popular, too. Maybe in this digital age where we’re connected online, we need to strengthen our personal identities and understand how our family impacts us.
Make researching your family’s history and Christmas customs part of looking back and learning about your family.
If you’re a grandparent or parent, you can share photos of your favorite toys, Christmas dinners, or Christmases that didn’t go as well as you planned.
How to Find the Christmas Stories
Start with the assets you have on hand: photos, videos, 8mm home movies, slide shows, and more. Use those old Christmas cards and letters, too.
Look at the years that your files are from and create stories based on who’s in the photo and what was happening in their lives and the community.
Local historical societies will often have newspaper archives that show the prices of toys and clothing, plus the news of the day.
See how families decorated to get an idea of the times. Remember the tinsel above.
What were traditions that your relatives had that have changed—and can you bring some of those traditions back or do you have your own?
Giving the Gift of Family History and Family Research
There are many free resources to use in researching family history. Here’s an excellent place to start:
Access free databases within the site like immigration records, military records, and census data.
You might run into roadblocks or you need a strategy to get started.
Consider using a FOREVER® professional researcher.
A consultation can get you started while in-depth sessions can help you uncover hard to find data. One of my colleagues, Margarita Buitrago, has used FOREVER®’s professional researchers to locate information on family history in Colombia, South America.
There may be language barriers you need to overcome if family members immigrated from another part of the globe. Researchers also know how to uncover records from churches or newspapers from many generations ago.
Melody’s children with Santa
You type your information into FOREVER® albums and describe your photos or documents.
Now that we’ve looked back, let’s look forward.
Remember that FOREVER® is designed for your family to use for a lifetime, plus the next 100 years and beyond. Try to imagine your great-grandchildren and their grandchildren clicking through the files.
More Benefits of FOREVER®
Once you’ve digitized your files you can easily turn them into gifts like photobooks, wall art, calendars, and more.
Use these gifts year ‘round for anniversaries, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, and fun ways to say “thank you” or “thinking of you.”
Here I am with my husband Gerald and our son Troy
Consider a Photo Coach as a Home-Business Career
Families need help digitizing, organizing, and storing their photos because many still have hard-copy files, have their phones and other devices clogged with digital photos and they don’t know how to bring them together in one place.
I’ll be glad to share about why the opportunity is even better today than when I started my photo coaching career in the mid-1990s.
I’m Here to Help
Me and mom today
Contact me for your needs related to organizing memories and researching family history.
Try FOREVER® with 2 free GB of storage to get a feel for how the site works.
Check the Events page on my website to learn more about using FOREVER® and writing your family’s story.
I’m passionate that your family’s history is worth preserving during Christmas and all year long.
