Passing It On

Black hole of cyberspace swallowing up yearbooks

R.I.P., the high school yearbook.

While it may be a bit premature to permanently lay to rest that once-ultimate document of the high school experience, its demise has already been noted in some parts of the country and sales have plummeted just about everywhere else.

My good blogging friend, Stefani Twyford of Legacy Multimedia in Houston, Texas, brought this matter to my attention, referring to an article in the Houston Chronicle.

There was a time less than a generation ago when as many as 80 percent of high school students bought yearbooks, a figure that now stands around 10-20 percent in those areas where a yearbook is published at all.

The culprit appears to be the proliferation of social networking sites, like MySpace and  Facebook, which have made yearbooks seem positively quaint in this cyber age. As one who will attend my own high school reunion this summer, I wonder how the current electronic sites will factor into the reunions of the MySpace generation. Yearbooks are the source document for every high school reunion I’ve attended and I can’t imagine a reunion without them or suitable surrogates.

For my father, his high school yearbook yielded an unexpected connection with a person he’s never met and who lives several states away.

A couple of years ago, Dad received via mail a copy of the yearbook from his senior year along with a letter. The letter explained that the yearbook was a gift from a Texas attorney who had acquired it at a garage sale. The attorney had gone through a rough patch of substance abuse that had cost him his career and marriage a few years back and part of his therapy was to find yearbooks at garage sales, pick one person from the senior class, track that person down and send them the yearbook.

Although the attorney has restored his life and has rebuilt his career, he continues to seek out the yearbooks. My dad was inspired by the experience and, since he already had a copy of the yearbook, he called a few classmates to offer them his extra copy but found they had kept theirs, too. Keep in mind that these people graduated from high school 70 years ago.

Do you think today’s high school seniors will be keeping their MySpace profiles 70 years from now?

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of portia91.

Cast a wide net to snare those family memories

So, this family history quest of yours has got you a bit down, huh?

You’ve spent all those hours tracking down your ancestors for your long-awaited family history book and now you’re running out of gas? All those once-interested relatives that promised to chip in with your research have stopped answering your e-mails and ignore your voicemail messages?

Cheer up, Bucko. Help may be just a few mouse clicks away.

Even if your immediate family has gone into the witness protection program, it’s almost a certainty that someone out there in your extended family shares your passion for collecting and sharing their family history. It may be a branch or two over from yours, but you need to reach out and explore some of those more-distant family lines. Check genealogical wikis like WeRelate.com or find forums that cater to your family surname or a locale that you’re interested in.

I’ve received gravestone photos of great grandparents from a woman whose own research led her to a small Missouri cemetery where, uncertain who might be in her lineage, she took photos of every gravestone. None proved to be her relatives, but she graciously shared what she had.

A classmate in my genealogy class managed to find an ornate ceremonial marriage certificate of her grandparents by connecting with non-relatives in two other states who had no idea how it came to be found in their family’s possessions. My classmate’s advice: Cast a wide net. You never know where information will come from.

Good advice, I’d say.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Social media sites can expand your family history knowledge

Do you Twitter? I don’t yet, but I probably will. Eventually.

For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, Twitter is another of those ubiquitous social networking tools that have swept over cyberspace. It’s kind of a mashup of e-mail, text messaging and instant messaging.

Although I have a natural aversion to anything that has a fairly steep learning curve in relation to its potential life expectancy, social media are too powerful to simply ignore. Thus, I blog, am a casual LinkedIn and Facebook participant and am an enthusiastic reader of RSS feeds via my Google Reader.

And, just as the Internet has created unprecedented easy access to millions upon millions of genealogical records, the proliferation of social media sites has made it easier than ever to manage and share your own family history online.

I’ve spent some time checking out many of these sites myself recently, finally settling on the free We Relate wiki site sponsored by the Foundation for On-Line Genealogy, Inc. in partnership with the Allen County Public Library. As my blogging friend Randy Seaver points out, there are plenty of these types of sites that you can check out yourself.

I picked We Relate because it includes many of the features I was looking for, most importantly,  the ability for others to add stories and pictures from their home computers. My father and brother did a great job of tracking down my father’s family line a while back and someone did some similar work on my mother’s line. Now I can put all this information into the wiki and share it with relatives in the hopes that they will be able to build onto the family legacy with more stories, research and photos. It’s free and very easy to use.

Even if you’re a bit wary of all this social media stuff, these genealogical sites offer a nifty way to expand and share your research. They’re worth a peek.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of blogefl.