Liv's Tree House

It's time for another BYU Family History Library Webinar.  This month I'll be presenting Preserving Family History in Fun & Modern Ways Thursday, March 28th at 3 PM Other Resources: Collectionaire Coupon Code: livs2019 50% Discount Expires May 31st, 2019 Doodly  Special Price FHTL.BYU.edu Feel free to let me know in the comments if you would like me to teach any of these products more step by step in a future webinar. To learn more about the BYU Family History Webinar Series and for more information: https://sites.lib.byu.edu/familyhistory/classes-and-webinars/online-webinars/  *See the side panel of my blog for other upcoming classes.

Here's the recorded webinar I taught through BYU Family History Library last week: Here are the slides with live links from the webinar: Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions. Thanks for attending! For more webinars from BYU Family History Library visit their homepage. Share what you've learned by sharing this button: Discover other tools I recommend for people in a crazy-busy life:

I'm excited to share some fun news... This year I've been invited to participate in the BYU Family History Library Webinar series. I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to reach friends near and far.  Hopefully this will give more people an opportunity to learn that Family History can be fun, exciting and most importantly that it can be done now in the busiest time of your life. This Thursday I'll be teaching one of, if not the most popular class that I've offered over the past few years, an oldie, but goodie: "Family History for the Crazy-busy Life". Join me to learn about all the cool tools, mostly apps, that you can use to make family history easy to sneak into this, the busiest time of your life. #CrazyBusyHelps Class description: So you've caught the bug, you love family history and would love to work on it all the time, BUT you struggle to find the balance because life is just so DARN busy. Take it from me, a crazy-busy mom of thr...

I'm welcoming myself back to the land of the living.  As my previous post series indicated my life is as a standard #CrazyBusy.  But drum roll.................add my 4th pregnancy to that crazy life and I kind of gave up trying to keep up with blogging, I was in survival mode.   However in the interest of a few things, 1) Joining 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks , with Amy Johnson Crow; 2) a renewed enthusiasm for all things social with Family History due to the fast approaching greatest genealogy conference,  RootsTech ; and 3) a desire to start my 21 Day Challenge again; here I am. So first to catch you up, I'm happy to report that we were able to get through all of the crazy first of the year PTA happenings without much of any hitch, I survived my 1st and 2nd trimester of pregnancy (phew), and I somehow survived my first official attempt at coordinating a Family Discovery Day.  We had a whopping 764 attendees for our little town of Payson, Utah, which was almos...

Alright so I had a super busy weekend.  I taught 3 classes this last Sunday at the BYU Family History Library , and what I hadn’t thought to prepare mentally for was the fact that if you’re teaching in the same room 3 classes in a row, you’ll also be chatting & on your feet not only the whole class hour, but also in between classes too.  So from 3-7:30 pm I was talking straight through.  That said, I was exhausted when I was done last night and my feet were killing me. Note to self, no heels when teaching at RootsTech .  Today I’ve been dragging a bit too, BUT I promised my class some info about Zoning on here today, so here it goes--- Zoning , a new tool from FamilySearch .  It’s in beta mode, so it’s likely to change from what I give here, but for now this is where things are at.  It’s a great alternative to indexing for those peeps who are burnt out from Indexing but are still not quite ready to dig into research, OR for those of us who research and ...

June's been a crazy month...So I write to catch up after the craziness.  June is always crazy for me on the mom front.  In fact, I haven't had a chance to do family history the whole month, and I'm missing it terribly, BUT FamilySearch is down today and so I blog.  June is always when we completely over schedule our kids, visit the pool far too many hours, and, this year, get all medical procedures done because we've already hit our out-of-pocket max on our health insurance and it's starting over next month. YIKES! I write from my lovely Adirondack chair overlooking a beautiful mountainous lake.  Why from the chair, you ask? Because due to said insurance circumstance I had a last-minute knee surgery last week, and to tie it into family history, I inherited some crappy knees! Needless to say it's left me fairly immobile, and so I write. Some exciting news that is blog worthy amidst the crazy-busy family schedule though...I was able to attend the Sunday BYU Fami...

I had a huge stack (as you can see) of binders to digitize, but the pages were those sticky kind where it’s like photograph suicide to remove…the only solution, a book scanner.  So to the BYU Family History Library I headed this weekend.  I couldn’t carry them all in so in enters the double stroller, I knew motherhood was preparing me for more than just mothering. Sadly, that amazing book scanner I used last time was apparently on trial at the time and has since been removed.  To those of you interested in using it, they said they’ll be purchasing one in the 2017 budget year, so it will return in the future.  BUT--I had a task to do so I decided to check out the other options for book scanners.  They have some amazing flatbed scanners that really do a great job and are quite quick…12 huge binders of photos and 4 hours later I was done. The great news is that during my time in the library I made some friends.  I love chatting it up with people and helping w...

Aside from my brackets being shot after 2 days of basketball madness, my parents' basement flooded. It was a mess.  THANKFULLY about 5 years ago I went on a digitizing craze.  During that time I digitized almost all my mom had as far as family photos and documents were concerned.  Unfortunately, due to my mad organization skills tons of the photos I had digitized got ruined because they were all together in folders and the dampness of the house made the photographs all stick together.  Ironically the ones heaved in drawers were totally fine because they weren't tightly packed. LESSON LEARNED. But after a full weekend of cleaning, sifting, and sorting here's a peak at my mess that I have to sift through now... Apparently after my uncle passed away my mom had inherited a lot of his documents and photos which also had a lot of family history stuff in there. Look at this gem... It's a family log from 1901.  It has tons of names and dates of births, deaths, marriages...

Scanning or digitizing your family treasure trove can seem to be an incredibly daunting task, but it doesn't have to be.  If you take a few minutes to educate yourself on the basics then you can make an informed decision about the best route for you and your archive. I got going on it myself in 2010.  I admit photos was an obsession before family history entered my radar--I'd say photos, digital scrap-booking, and family movies was what led me to discover my love for genealogy.  So I'm pretty sure I am genetically hard-wired this way.  So with 6 years of experience under my belt and research on the subject I'll give you the basics. First of all, assess what you've got, and what you can and want to digitize.  You'll likely be surprised at the things that you'll find as you start to dig.  Things like photos and documents are easy to scan, but many of us have things like film, tape, & heirlooms that can be a little more tricky to digitize. Next, learn a bi...