Bite-Sized Family History Preservation

Early this year, Sis and I promised our family that we would create a photo book showing Mom (Daisy) and Dad (Harry) and our family. We wanted to include photos and stories stretching from birth of the children to school days to adulthood.

It didn't take long to realize how sprawling this would be if we tried to cover all major milestones from birth to today in a single project. 

Instead, we decided to go bite-sized so this project doesn't become overwhelming or unwieldy. 

To start, Sis and I are focusing on the first decade of our family life, not our entire family's history. We're collecting and digitizing our childhood photos and documents, little by little. It's been fun to reminisce as we plan and scan. Scanning sets the stage for cropping, repairing, and/or sharpening each photo. We want these photos to look their best for posterity. 

We recognize there are family stories that only we can tell because we were there and we still remember. We have to share these stories NOW to keep them alive for the next generation.

After we complete the first decade's photo book, we'll sit back and appreciate how good the book looks. 😀 Then we can begin planning for the second decade's photo book. Breaking this big project into smaller bites makes it doable and keeps us interested and motivated.

Try a bite-sized project by putting the focus on one ancestor (or a couple, spouses or siblings), a special occasion (wedding, birthday, reunion, etc.), a specific time period (a special year in the life of an ancestor, for instance), a particular heirloom, a special place in family history, or a photo from family history.

Wordless Wednesday - Subway-Savvy City Kids Touch a Cow

One summer my parents (Daisy and Harold Burk) decided that we NYC kids should get a taste of farm living. This is where some mysteries of life would be revealed: Where does milk really come from? That is, before it gets delivered in big tanker trucks to the big bottling plant our school used to visit in the Northeast Bronx.

Our family spent at least a week, possibly two, at a farm in upstate New York, playing with barn kittens (so tiny), learning to milk a cow (carefully), seeing chickens and ducks (new discovery: they chase you!), and, as seen here, learning to swim in the farm's pool. The kids slept in a bunk house and the adults had rooms in the main house. It was a bit exotic and even foreign feeling to subway-savvy city kids like us, who had never touched a cow or fed a chicken.