Every September for the past several years I’ve had a Save Your Photo event that lasts throughout the month. There will be my usual photo organization event, but this year I’m going to add saving your genealogy. You can decide if you just want to focus on your photos or your genealogy or both. (See sign-ups for both below)

The idea for this September’s project stems from all the fires we’ve seen in the news. It seems like all of British Columbia is on fire and I know there are fires in other provinces across Canada. I live in Alberta and this has to be one of the driest summers I’ve seen for many years. We are constantly in the high 20’s and even the 30’s celsius. With little or no rain. I’ve also seen fires in Montana and other locations.

My friend in British Columbia was on evacuation alert a few weeks ago and this again brought to mind that I really do need to plan for such an event. In fact, I had another friend who lives in Edmonton who had a fire a couple of doors away from her house and she had to evacuate in the middle of the night. How frightening.

As you know if you’ve been following along I’ve got a lot of my photos (if not all) stored in my FOREVER account. But all these events made me realize that I don’t want to have to worry about my years of research going up in flames or worrying about what I would take if something terrible were to happen. I don’t mean to use scare tactics … I just think about these things and that’s how this idea started.

This year’s Save Your Genealogy Research port of the program is a work in progress. I started doing this for myself and making notes so that I can pass them along to you. I hope you find this helpful and feel free to offer your own insight and suggestions and of course I hope you’ll join in.

As you might imagine from the title I’ll be using FOREVER. The process can be started with a FREE account but will eventually require some paid storage. This isn’t a bad thing in fact it’s part of having a 3-2-1 plan. Three copies, two different media, one cloud storage. With FOREVER you can have confidence in your cloud storage and you have permanence and I’ll even show you how you can do it for less… after all, “I am the coupon queen.”

I’ll be sending out an email or video where I explain to you or show you how I’ve set my genealogy records up. My process will be laid out over the month but as you can imagine the process of doing this with all your research will take much longer than a month.

Please be sure to confirm your email so you are added to the list correctly so you don’t miss a thing.

Part One

Part One will be about how I’ve set up my genealogy albums and nested albums. Feel free to follow my lead exactly or make changes to make this work for you.

Part Two

Part Two will go further in-depth regarding the file creation, including a folder about You – The Star. This will carry over into November which is Family History Month where if you decide to continue along will be the start of creating a book that you will be able to leave as a legacy. More about that later.

Part Three

Part three is an explanation of my process for each generation. This can be a “do-over” of sorts if that’s something you’ve been thinking about doing.

Part Four

In my case I not only have documents on my computer but I also have binders and loose documents and papers to deal with. The items on my computer are easy because they have already been digitized and this really is only creating a cloud version of what I have on my computer.

In the case of the binders and the loose documents that I have, this will mean going through these items and deciding if I will digitize them myself or whether I will put them in the FOREVER Box that I’ve purchased.

That’s one of the things I’ve been doing. Putting those loose things I find around the house into the bins I started quite a few years ago. 2017 to be exact, you can read about that HERE.

So as you can see this is just the beginning but you have to start somewhere. One step at a time as they say.

Organize Your Photos

Please be sure to confirm your email so you are added to the list correctly so you don’t miss a thing.

What if you just want to organize your photos? No worries… then just like before sign up on the above button and you’ll receive daily tips as to how you can sort, organize and share your family photos. Whether you use FOREVER or not. If you’ve gone through this process before please do sign up again as I don’t save the emails from previous years.

I hope you join one of both of these lists.. and start the process of organizing your genealogy and or photos this September. I can’t wait to get started.