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I met this guy at a party the other night and when I told him that I was a personal historian and biographer, he became really, really excited. He said to me, “I have to show you this album I did with my son for his 5th grade class project.”

We often hear clients complain they can’t remove their photos from those old inexpensive magnetic photo albums. Those are the ones with the pre-glued pages that you just stick the photos in and slide the plastic sleeve over the outside.

I was reading a blog posting at the Science of Raising Happy Kids where the author, Christine Carter, Ph.D. suggested wrote, “Research shows that telling stories about your shared past creates strong and secure emotional bonds, which directly impacts how well families are functioning. Turns out this study also found that kids who knew a lot about their family history learned it at dinnertime.”

In previous posts I have talked about sorting and archiving old photos and how important it is to do that. But, I have actually been been daunted by the task of organizing my own digital images.

The idea of creating a family history or genealogical tree, while a formidable task, sometimes occurs to us as quite simple. We enroll all our family members into this meaningful project. They all go through their media, (photos, old reels of film, mementos) and come up with the best pieces.

First of all, what is oral history? Put simply it is a collection of testimonies by living persons to record their unique life stories. They are not based on gossip, hearsay or rumors. Instead, oral histories are chronicles of direct observations as told by the people who witnessed the events or lived through the experiences being described.

This past summer I stayed at a bed and breakfast in Colorado. It was a beautiful, well-restored Victorian home and in the parlor, hung many turn-of-the-century photos of the home and of some its residents. I asked the proprietor if she knew who the people were.

It’s only three more days until one of our favorite holidays, Thanksgiving, is once again upon us. Celebrated annually for almost 400 years now, this is a time we come together with family and friends to give thanks for abundance and all we have to be grateful for.

Shortly after my husband Loren and I married, we moved to San Francisco to start our new careers and new life. As the moving van was pulling up in front of our new apartment, we noticed two small children sitting on the stoop of the apartment two doors down.

I don’t know if this is a new trend or not but I’ve been noticing an abundance of family memoir cookbooks. These cookbooks will typically serve up recipes that have been passed down from one generation to another along with photos of the family, slices of daily life and dollops of family history.