I received the following letter which I reprint here. It opens up the whole can of worms that’s been addressed in various forums before. If anyone else has opinions please send them in.
PassageExpress
Back at that favorite topic: how to share family history. Or as I prefer, how to share family history that your family will actually read and enjoy.
Over the holidays one of my sisters phoned me and we got to talking about the family history ‘installments’ that I wrote a few years ago.
She told me, sheepishly, that she couldn’t follow them. Couldn’t follow them?!? I was so clear about everything. Every week or two, I emailed another chapter with stories and photos of people and places. Every chapter was hinged to the previous one. Family history written as a cliff-hanger. …[continued]
Assuming you’ve gone ahead and made some collages in your free time, another thing you can do with them, of course, is put them into slideshows. I also use collage a lot in my Passage Express projects to break up the tedium of the text. It’s an easy way to interject some color and keep my viewers awake. Our ancestors did not actually live in an endless atmosphere of black, white and sepia.
Now that it’s November, should we start thinking about how to turn our genealogy files into Christmas presents? … again.
We have made Christmas into a truly seasonal holiday. It takes two months to get ready and another month to recover. Literally a season.
No, I haven’t dropped off the face of the Earth. Following my own advice, I finished my first Passage Express project. 740 MB of charts and chapters and photos and slideshows and maps. Then some relatives came calling. Then the sun turned to rain and I’ve turned into a squirrel preparing for winter. A large pot of home-made soup on the stove as I speak.
Speaking of squirrels – Years ago I used to bring newspapers and magazines into my house. I don’t know why. They just looked interesting, I guess. First I had to make space for them, and that’s not easy here so I was constantly moving the ever-growing pile. Then I found myself distressed with the pressure of having to read them and never having enough time. But I kept bringing home more. It took me forever to realize the simple solution – STOP bringing them home. So I stopped.
As I’m sure you’ve noticed, Passage Express is just a folder tree with pizazz. Worthwhile pizazz to be sure. It’s an attractive way to present your family history.
For longer than I can say I have been trying to use my photos in multiple locations and finding it way too much work. And this is not the first time I’ve been looking for a cure. Being in the usual labyrinth with my now-12,000 photographs, and yet-another filing system experiment, I went to have another look at what the rest of the world is doing. …[continued]
My computer does not have a DVD-drive and it only has a 30 GB hard-drive so movies and videos are pretty much out of range here. Don’t know much about them really.
I once got excited over having AVI’s made of some 1950′s home movies; little bundles in snowsuits racing around the screen at warp speed, very funny stuff, so I tried taking one (4GB) apart to re-order the segments. Not only did it crash the program I was working with but it crashed my whole computer so bad I had to re-install the operating system. I’m sure smaller movies are possible but not something I’ve spent much time with so far. I’m still back in the dinosaur age with slideshows.
Sure as the sun comes up tomorrow, someone will come up with another way to file photographs.
Having a photo collection is one thing. Trying to tell a story with pictures is something else. The choices for how to go about this are endless. To me, all this genealogy collecting comes down to presentation. So I try to look at this from the end point backwards. What and how am I going to share it? So, it helps to have a broad overview of a plan. And a photo filing system that allows me to change my mind.
Before there was Passage Express I couldn’t imagine organizing so many files and types of files for presentation.
Then, in the middle of the night it came to me. I would create Descendants Book reports in pdf and attach other files in the margin. This way a reader could take a side-trip to look at maps, photos, slideshows, related stories, or even listen to me talk, and then come back to the main body of work without getting lost.
