Liv's Tree House

Part 3 of my #CrazyBusyHelps series.  Admittedly, I haven’t tried many other calendars, so I suppose many calendars have many of these same features. However, at a fairly early point in my electronic life, I discovered Google makes calendaring easy by offering a little bit of everything.  That way I can have one account that can do countless things, so for me, I choose to use Google Calendar along with all my other Google products. But an online calendar that can be installed across all your devices is a MUST HAVE for us Crazy-Busies. There are some of you out there who are going to argue with me--I know because I have a surprisingly large amount of people still show up to various meetings with a notebook and no electronic device.  To you I must say: it’s time!  I seriously can’t believe how many people don’t use Google Keep, Google Drive, or Google Calendar; I honestly have no idea how they keep their life in order.  Hats off to those of you who can use the trusty old planner and note

Part 2 of my #CrazyBusyHelps series.  Ahhh…..Google Keep! Of all the things I could not live without, Keep ranks extremely high on my list.  It’s literally my brain most of the time.  One of the most common things people say to me is “I don’t know how you do it all!”.  I say to you, I could not do it “all” without this fabulous tool, and lots of prayers. What problems does it solve? The jumbled brain problem…. Do you have endless tasks and to-do’s floating around in your head, and you're just trying to keep them all straight? Have you ever gotten to the store and realized you forgot your shopping list? Or come home from the store to realize your spouse needed just one more thing? Do you have “I keep forgetting to…” syndrome? Started that Honey Do List lots of times, but can’t see to keep track of it? Trying to remember all the things you need to pack for your trip? Want to remember a great quote you heard? Haven’t figured out a good menu-planning solution? Google Keep will solve al

You’re going to hear a lot about Google over the next few days, because--let’s face it--Google has absolutely tapped into what we Crazy-busy’s need, and I for one am sincerely appreciative. We’re kicking off the series with Google Photos, mainly because they recently announced on their blog an exciting new feature called “Shared Libraries,” and it’s going to save you tons of time. But we’ll get to that in a minute. Why Google Photos? What problems does it solve? Every photo problem, but seriously… Do you have endless digital photos in endless locations? Phone, computer, tablet, external hard drive, thumb drive, CD’s or DVD’s Have old hard copy photos from pre-digital picture days? Keep promising to send pictures to certain someones and keep forgetting? Need to find a picture of your dad for father’s day? Want to preserve your favorite trip pictures in an album and share them with the whole family? Why not give them the opportunity to contribute their trip photos? Ever wanted to make a

I’m excited to kick off a new chapter of my blog.  I’ve been incredibly inspired recently amidst my “crazy-busy” life. I’ve always been on the busy side.  I get it from my mom. It’s one of those learned, possibly inherited, traits.  But when people would make comments about my busy-ness in the past, I didn’t ever feel like I was that busy.  Until recently, that is.  I totally have “Oh, I can take care of that syndrome,” and most likely if you’re reading this, you struggle with the same problem.  It’s not a bad thing, the world needs people like us, BUT the last month or so I have felt all of my commitments surfacing to a head.  I’m learning a lot about not only delegating, but truly letting go when I delegate, and the results are actually surprisingly awesome! So in the middle of one of my, “oh crap, what have I done to my life” moments the other day, I was trying to validate my overwhelmed feeling by listing in my head the list of responsibilities on my plate (in no particular order o

A fun part of being in the genealogy community is that you get to hook up with other moms just like you.  I've had just such a pleasure of getting to know a lot of great ladies through a FaceBook Group, Family History for Children. One of these great ladies, Katie Potter over at https://www.storybookancestor.org/, invited me tonight to answer the following questions: Do you have an ancestor that you have connected with in a special way? Who is it?  Tell what it is about that person that resonates with you. Why do you feel so connected to them? The answer to 1 is a resounding YES .  Several flood my mind immediately. So as you can imagine I'm excited to give her my answer, and I thought it would be fun to share it here as well. Over the past 5 or 6 years that I've really been doing family history, I've had several experiences with different ancestors.  Times I've gotten to know them in ways I don't know that I would have, even if I met them during life; other ti

We just got home from our friend's house and he was telling us some wonderful & fascinating stories about his family's history.  He didn't realize he was a closet "family historian."  In fact, my favorite quote of the night was, "I don't like family history, I just like the history of my family," which he insisted was different until we pointed out this quote by Elder Alan F Packer to him: "Family history is more than genealogy, rules, names, dates, and places. It is more than a focus on the past. Family history also includes the present as we create our own history. It includes the future as we shape future history through our descendants. A young mother, for example, sharing her family stories and pictures with her children is doing family history work." (One of my favorites, I might add). So the point is, after listening to his stories and witnessing the pride he had in his heritage it made me reflect on the fact that we all likely h

Ever since I heard the topic for this month's blog link up, the excitement to write has been hard to contain.  I love this topic! Why, you ask?  Because I AM a BUSY--scratch that--an EXTREMELY BUSY mom; and I still find time for Family History. Why, you ask again?  Because I make it a priority! I make it a priority because I’ve experienced the difference it can make in my life and those I share it with. Genealogy and Family History Work has long been thought of as a hobby for OLD PEOPLE: “another season of life,” “when I’m less busy,” are what I often hear when talking with my peers. BUT to them I ask, Why should the “old people” get to have all the fun?!! Besides, if I wait until I’m older, all the people who have the precious memories I can glean from will be gone!  I’d argue that I’m at the PERFECT age! With the crazy advances in technology that happen almost daily, which I was raised with, the absurd amount of records becoming available each month, and with 3 perfect little imi

Why do you think it’s important to share family history with children? Admittedly, I struggled with this post. Not because I don’t believe that it’s important to share family history with my kids, but it’s hard to put my finger on WHY. In preparation for this post the following video kept coming to mind, so I dug it up to share with you. If just the simple concept of the importance of family to kids can be so powerful  (all for a food commercial, might I add), how powerful then can family be if you include generations of them? Generations of ancestors who came before, who sacrificed, who worked hard, who both succeeded and failed…generations of love and of hurt…generations of pressing on, and generations of families. It's been my personal experience that Mulan isn't too far off.  I say that with a bit of a tease, but there is something true about drawing on your ancestors' power, their strengths, and their help; and if you don't know them, and you don't know their

So...this class was born from my recognition that I really do have a very distinct process for managing the messes that I find when doing my family history in FamilySearch. I learned it through picking several peoples brains about their process then adapting it to be my own.  That said, consider this all a guideline then adapt it to fit your brain. I have a very strong conviction that it's important, as a member of the LDS church, to help contribute to the clean up and improvement of the great big tree known as FamilySearch Family Tree.  I've honestly spent most of my time as a genealogist cleaning up messes and have learned nearly all of my researching skills from working through those messes.  It wasn't until recently that I realized that even some who have been doing genealogy for years are just avoiding the so called "messes" because they don't really know how to tackle them. And so this class was born. First of all lets define "knots" from the t

So this little puppy came in the mail today! I was super excited to win the WeGather raffle at RootsTech . I feel like I never win, and I honestly didn't know I entered to win, so winning was a complete surprise.  But--I do not write simply because I won.  I have to report on WeGather because it's awesome, and I love the developer! Stories are the currency of our past, present and future. Without them, we are bankrupt. Since family photos trigger those stories, we should save and share them. --   Rachel LaCour Niesen So I met Rachel at her booth at RootsTech, but I had been following her site for months before that. I absolutely love her, I love her passion, her drive, her mission, and all that her site stands for.  We share our passion for photos and stories and she's got some amazing resources. I've learned some great tips and tricks from following her.  She has great insight into photos and stories and how they can impact who we are and who we can become. She has gu

So just finished my last classes at RootsTech today.  I had the opportunity to teach 1 on Wednesday and 2 more today.  It was an incredible experience to have the opportunity share the things I love with so many interested and anxious learners.  If you came to my class, thanks for coming, and I hope that you have tons of success moving forward. I hope that some of you will take the time to share some of those experiences in the comments. Let me know if there is anything I can do to help you out in the process. For those who attended and wanted the links here's a copy of my syllabus and the slides:     Download the Syllabus PDF to use the links UPDATE: Use the following URL for Zoning https://familysearch.org/zoning/ 

I've been teaching this class for a few months now and have quickly gathered so many great resources that I want to share, but 1 hour just never seems to be enough.  So I'm going to share some of the class info here, just so class participants can come here to learn more since we won't have a change to address all of the cool programs out there. First of all here's the class syllabus and slides so you can go visit the links and play around with the programs yourself: Download the class syllabus with live links. Then here's a playlist of tutorials I created on YouTube for helping you see how you can use the different programs for your family history creations.  DISCLAIMER: They are FAR from professional, just tutorials I put together quickly using free programs, so I'm sorry they're not higher quality, but hopefully they'll still be helpful. If you have questions, feel free to comment here, or on the videos, or just email me.  Hope you have tons of fun

LivsTreeHouse@gmail.com