Creating Your Own Family History: Four Little-known Secrets to Transforming Your Digital Memories Into an Amazing Family History

Most people do not think with the end in mind when saving their digital memories. What you do now, and how you save your digital memories and events, is your direct link with your future generations. The digital legacy that you create now is the way your children, grand children and eve your great grandchildren will view your life. It’s important to have a system that helps people to view your accomplishments even when you’re not there. They need to be able to make sense of your digital memories. First and foremost, let’s go through the four steps you need:

1. Store everything in one place on your PC.

Centrally locate all of your digital memories in every format in one place, in one program on your computer. Your digital memory compiling system should allow you and future viewers to unravel your life on screen as it actually unfolded in reality. The best way to store things so that they are easily retrieved is to have a filing system based on a year-by-year and event-by-event structure.

2. Save it how it actually happens.

Save all of your memories for any given year in the one folder. Then any special event that occurs in that year should have all the digital memories of any format in this one folder. This means that when you or your children or grandchildren are looking at it, they only need to go to one place to find all the memories for any given event. This system is distinctly different to having your memories in different folders and different programs, with videos in one place and photos and journal entries in a different spot.

A simple example: You have a folder called 2007, and you have ten special occasions that year. One was titled your August 2007 European Holiday, and in your European Holiday folder you’ve got all of your photos, all of your videos, any recording files, invitations, blog posts, copied emails that you may have recorded or done for that event – all in one place, easy to find.

3. Add incredible depth to your family history.

Look at all of the different things you can actually save. You could create a digital journal, copy blog posts into Word documents and save them, scan in invitations from weddings & parties, save emails and web links – you can save them all and put them into your special occasions folder. You can actually take clippings off websites, videos from YouTube – there are so many things now that you can actually save that will add an incredible depth to your family history. It’s not just photos and videos anymore. I highly recommend at the very least creating special occasion journal entries that add deeper information and specific details of your special times e.g. place names, people’s names, contact details, interesting occurrences and much more. These should correspond directly with all your other memories all in one central program.

4. Keep it safe.

Have a simple system to back up all of your memories. Make sure it’s simple so that you will do it often. You also need to have an automated system. That means that you can’t forget to back up, as the automated system will back up for you regardless of how busy you are.

If you follow these four steps, you and your future generations will rejoice in the amazing outcome and wonderful opportunity to watch your life unfold. Your children and grandchildren – future loved ones – won’t have any doubt of what you did, when you did it, who you did it with and how great it was. Make sure that you have these four steps in place, and you will create a wonderful family history.