I have spent most of my summer with my grandchildren, which is my favorite way to spend my time. Recently they asked to go through the family photo albums with me, and I can’t think of a better way to help make those connections for your family. We spent some of that trying to decide if the “Brawn nose” some of them inherited from my husband Fred actually came from the Brawn or the Decker side. (The jury is still out on that one!)
Summer is also a good time to make those excursions which are so difficult once the Maine winters hit.
It is also a good time to get genealogy supplies, because of all the “back-to-school” sales. Whether you are still heavily into research and using highlighters and notebooks, or organizing your documents and need sheet protectors and other supplies — take advantage of sale prices.
This is also one of the best times of year to buy computers and technology supplies. This is when technology companies begin their biggest sales push, as graduates will be heading off to college and proud parents need to buy computers to send them away from home. Right now, flash drives, and other memory media, jewel cases, and computers themselves are widely available and some great offers are out there for the careful shopper.
I cannot begin to imagine doing genealogy without a computer anymore (although we used it for letter writing more than anything, when Cindy and I began.) I use my computer for scanning photographs and documents, and organizing and sorting my research with spreadsheets. Of course I do letter (and article) writing with my computer word processor, keep in touch via e-mail, and start most of my research on the Internet. I keep my records organized with genealogy programs, and use them to print my pedigree charts and family group sheets for my notebooks.
Don’t get me wrong, I love to read real books and handle old papers, but a computer makes all the mundane aspects so much easier. There are some very cool programs available to pull your photos and documents together. I am not creative, but computer programs make it easy to create very impressive scrapbook pages and even real books, start planning now, to have them done for Christmas.
How ever you choose to spend your summer, be sure to include family.
Editor’s note: This regular column is sponsored by the Aroostook County Genealogical Society. The group meets the fourth Monday of the month except in July and December at the Cary Medical Center’s Chan Education Center, 163 Van Buren Road, Caribou, at 6:30 p.m. Guests and prospective members are always welcome. FMI contact Edwin “J” Bullard at 492-5501. Columnist Nina Brawn of Dover-Foxcroft, who has been doing genealogy for over 30 years, is a freelance genealogy researcher, speaker and teacher. Reader e-mails are welcome at ninabrawn@gmail.com.
