Legacy LVUG Community

Wednesday's Words of Wisdom - not a usual entry but how about if we do a couple of things leading up to Thanksgiving in the USA (if you live in another country feel free to follow along!). (1) Spend more time with family and friends and less time with social media and games this holiday weekend. Tune out the noise and connect - have a few quiet moments when you can ask questions or have a relative share a story (and please record it - lots of voice recorders on those smart phones). How many of us would love to be able to hear the voices of our ancestors - grandparents, great grandparents, uncles & aunts? Well future generations will feel the same way - so take a few moments and just do it! (2) Realize we all have triggers - whether that is the economy, the election, religion or "fill in the blank." How about this Thanksgiving season we pull back from those triggers and just enjoy family and friends. Make your Thanksgiving table a "trigger free zone....

Tuesday's Tip - last week I mentioned StoryCorps as a wonderful site for helping each of us gather stories. Well just in time for Thanksgiving (hopefully you are picking up that turkey soon!) comes another great website with some terrific questions to ask family members as you gather round the table. Check out the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage's questions to engage family members. My suggestion - choose some of these questions and type them in blocks - cut out the blocks and fold in half. If you have specific questions from a particular person, place those questions on their plate/place setting. Otherwise fill a bowl and pass it around during dinner. Then sit around with the voice recorder on and ask individuals to read the question and tell their story. You will have not only the story but their voice to add to your family history. Definitely add their story to your Legacy Family Tree family files. Take a look at the questions - which ones do y...

And if any in our LVUG Community need another reason to join in the Great Thanksgiving Listen , watch this short video. I really wish I had my grandparents' voices on tape telling me any stories of their lives. How about you?  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGCD1XR0WPk

Photo by Bewarekoof com official on Unsplash Tuesday's Tip - While it is important to get the names, dates and places, we all know it is about more than those bare facts. We have this passion for genealogy and family history because we want to learn more, share more, and leave more to our extended families . Whether you focus on your own immediate family, or have branched out to your extended family, or have taken a specialized study on board (a one-name study, a one-place study, a cemetery study or any one of the many other interesting and lesser-known studies) - it is all about asking questions, writing up those stories, and piecing together any one of those varied family puzzles. So how do you gather those stories? Where do you find those potential questions? When do you sit down with relatives and listen? Take advantage of the StoryCorps' Great Thanksgiving Listen (I love StoryCorps' mission and share it every year with our LVUG Community). StoryCorps rece...

First off,  I am thankful for my co-moderators here at the LVUG Community -Susan Clark Linda McCauley and Carol Stevens have been and continue to be a huge help and keep me in the know genealogy speaking. We have been joined in hangouts by Monique Riley and Shannon Thomas who have shared their knowledge of Legacy and other great tools like Animap and Evernote. To all those who started out with us and to all of you have joined us - as of today 762 members - thanks and welcome. To the folks at Legacy Family Tree Software who have put together a great software program and continue to make improvements and inform and educate with their Legacy Webinars - thanks. And to the Google folks who provide the opportunity for us to use Google+, YouTube and Communities - so we can all share online - we have come a long way in the past few years! Now to share a little bit of how I am using Legacy this Thanksgiving season. I put together some photos and Legacy scr...