Sharing Family Pictures

This past weekend members of our family met for dinner at my sister's house. Three siblings came and one brother did not. In preparation for this get together I completed a project I started over a year ago. At that time when we met I shared my mother's picture albums with them and they all tagged the pictures that they wanted with their individual colored stick on tags. Later one of my nieces also tagged the pictures that she wanted copies digitized. Each of their pictures was filed in their scan files. When I was finished there were over 200 pictures. I decided to give them their own pictures and all the other picture files on a flash drive. Now those files will be saved on four different computers besides my own and our back up hard drive. I still want to scan the pages of most of the albums. It is a challenge to share and then preserve the memories of our families. This is a great project for Family History Month in preparation for Thanksgiving when we may be together with our families. Just do it and you will be so glad that you did.

DNA Discoveries

This has been another amazing day. About 50 years ago I became interested in genealogy or family history. After years of education, training and hard work the rewards are becoming evermore fruitful. Thank you to everyone that has shared in that journey. Tonight as I pulled into the library parking lot to attend a genealogy group meeting in St. Helens, OR, my phone sounded the ping. I took a moment to look at it and saw a message from someone who I helped recently take a DNA test. The results were wonderful. Then a short time ago this person sent a letter about the results to one of her proven family connections. Once I returned home my messages were overtaken by this person and their connection. For privacy reasons I won't share more than that about the situation. My heart is full as the persons reached out to each other in this newly discovered connection. This has happened to me before, but this time it is something extra special. I believe in respecting privacy and handling delicate situations carefully. DNA tests do not lie and the results may not be what we want, but how blessed we are in this day to have the tools to make these discoveries happen. Between cell phones, internet connections, and regular mail options we now can build our families more fully around the world. Thank you so much for those who have shared their DNA discoveries with me.