by Lisa Cooke | Nov 26, 2013 | 01 What's New, Gifts, Holidays, Inspiration, Photographs
Get inspired by these heritage home decor ideas! Sharing family history in displays around the house inspires conversation, reinforces your family’s identity, and creates beautiful surroundings. Genealogy gift ideas: give these as gifts for your loved ones’ homes (or get them as gifts for yourself).
4 Heritage Home Decor Ideas
Family Tree Wall Decor
I love how this gorgeous black tree design anchors a heritage wall display. This design would look great with current pictures of grandkids and other loved ones, or with older pictures of ancestors. Sometimes when your heritage photos are all different sizes and styles (and you don’t have a dozen matching frames) it’s hard to figure out how to hang them together. But as you can see, the display looks great with different size images and frames!
Here’s another style I think you’ll like, too. It’s a great design for a more compact wall space.
Bronze Family Tree Picture Frame (6 photos)
This compact, stylish, and ornamental design fits easily on a coffee or end table or even a fireplace mantel. The tree comes with six little frames (order an extra set of 4 here). Again, think of this as a great way to show off pictures of your children or grandchildren, or use it to display treasured images of ancestors.
Crafting a Meaningful Home:27 DIY Projects to Tell Stories, Hold Memories and Celebrate Family Heritage
by Meg Mateo Ilasco.
If you like to make your own heritage displays, this book is for you. It’s packed with inspired ideas and detailed instructions on how to make things like decoupaged plates, a memory wall, and silhouettes on canvas. The projects shown are all really adaptable to fit your supplies and style. Meg thinks “out-of-the-box” about ways to preserve and display your memories–way beyond the traditional framed pictures, which are great but may not express the creative side of some of us!
DNA Ethnicity Charts from Family ChartMasters. These custom DNA ethnicity charts, based on your DNA test results, are gorgeous 21st-century conversation-starters to display in your home. Loved ones who may never glance at your painstakingly-researched family tree chart may make a beeline for these world maps and start asking questions!
You can choose from three different design options. The Basic theme is clean and fresh, and complements most decorating styles. The Antique theme’s sepia-tone finish brings together the styling of antique maps with your high-tech DNA profile. The Modern theme is graphic and bold, with neutral tones well-suited to contemporary décor. Which design would look best in your home–and on which wall?
See more heritage home decor ideas on my Pinterest boards. If you love heritage home decor, you should especially check out How to Display Your Family Tree and A Vintage Look at Home.
Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links and Genealogy Gems will be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on these links (at no additional cost to you). Thank you for supporting the free Genealogy Gems podcast and blog!
by Lisa Cooke | Nov 26, 2013 | 01 What's New, Book Club, Gifts, Holidays, Inspiration, Photographs
Sharing our family history in displays around the house inspires conversation, reinforces our family’s sense of identity and can also create beautiful 
surroundings! Here are some of my favorite picks for inspired heritage home decor that will help you “walk the talk”. Pick one up as a holiday gift or one for your own home–or both!
Family Tree Wall Decor
I love how this gorgeous black tree design anchors a heritage wall display. They use current pictures of kids and grandkids, but I think it would also look great with older pictures of ancestors. Sometimes when your heritage photos are all different sizes and styles (and you don’t have a dozen matching frames) it’s hard to figure out how to hang them together. But as you can see, the display looks great with different size images and frames!
Bronze Family Tree Picture Frame (6 photos)
This compact, stylish and ornamental design fits easily on a coffee or end table or even a fireplace mantel. The tree comes with 6 little frames: order an extra set of 4 here. Again, think of this as a great way to show off pictures of your children or grandchildren, or use it to display treasured images of ancestors.
Order Additional Picture Frames
Crafting a Meaningful Home: 27 DIY Projects to Tell Stories, Hold Memories and Celebrate Family Heritage by Meg Mateo Ilasco.
If you like to make your own heritage displays, this book is for you. It’s packed with inspired ideas and detailed instructions on how to make things like decoupaged plates, a memory wall and silhouettes on canvas. The projects shown are all really adaptable to fit your supplies and style. Meg thinks “out-of-the-box” about ways to preserve and show memories–way beyond the traditional framed pictures which are great but may not express the creative side of some of us.
Espy Photo Frames (styles vary). This link will take you to my own store, where I offer these one-of-a-kind frames, exclusive to Genealogy Gems. The images, though nice, don’t do these frames justice. The edges are encrusted with original vintage jewelry pieces, antique mini-artifacts, pearls and beads and other little surprises. The openings can hold a mirror but also make a fabulous home for heritage photos. The frames draw the eye and hold it: nobody will miss this display and whatever loved one’s image holds a place of honor in it. Check out all the styles on my site after you click on the link above.
Need more ideas? Check my boards at Pinterest: Lisa Louise Cooke
Family History Craft Projects
Legacy Displays
by Lisa Cooke | Nov 25, 2013 | 01 What's New, Collaborate, Evernote
In this installment of the Collaborative Genealogy blog post mini-series I’m going to share one of my favorite ways to organize and share family history data and 
source material: Evernote.
Evernote is a free software, website and app that can hold both research content and the source citation information that goes with it. You can pull data from websites and Evernote will often automatically capture information about the site you got it from. You can upload images, scanned documents and other multimedia content. And of course you can use it to keep track of non-electronic sources, too.
Research teams using Dropbox put themselves on the same page–literally. It’s easier to be sure you’re looking at the same sources. It’s easy to add notes like data you’ve abstracted from the source (or that seems to be missing from the source). It’s easy to tag data: every source that cites an ancestor can be tagged with her name. That way, when you are ready to analyze or write up someone’s life story, every piece is there. No more hunting for sources you knew you had somewhere!
My recent post provides two tips for using Evernote and introduces my Evernote for Windows for Genealogists Quick Reference Guide “cheat sheet” (click here for U.S. and here for international shipping). It’s been so popular since its release that we sold out for a while, but it’s back in stock. This 4-page laminated guide offers at-a-glance training and reminders so you can be up to speed quickly using Evernote for genealogy.
Want to learn more about using Evernote? Click here for tips and complete resources on getting started in Evernote, like a complete video mini-series that walks you through the process of signing up for your free Evernote account, downloading the desktop app, getting and using the web clipper….There’s so much you can do with Evernote and I show you how!
For more on collaborative research (including more on Evernote for genealogists), check out the December 2013 issue of Family Tree Magazine. It’s got an article I’ve co-written with Genealogy Gems Contributing Editor Sunny Morton.
Check out my other blog posts in this series on collaboration:
Tips for Collaborative Genealogy: Research with a Partner
Tips for Collaborative Genealogy: Dropbox for Genealogists
Tips for Collaborative Genealogy: Sharing Genealogy Files Online for Free
by Lisa Cooke | Nov 25, 2013 | 01 What's New, Evernote, Gifts, Organization
Some genealogists–actually, most genealogists–need help being organized. These genealogy gift ideas are the perfect gift to give yourself: the gift of 
helping you keep track of your research, your sources and everything else in your family history world.
These ideas include those for gathering and organizing your research materials but also precious memories and original artifacts. When you shop, and click on the links from this post your purchases help support the free Genealogy Gems podcast. Thank you!
Evernote. Ok, this program is FREE so maybe it doesn’t count as a holiday gift. But sometimes the most important gifts we can give someone (including ourselves) are TIME and a FRESH START. That’s what you’ll give when you install Evernote on your computer or a loved one’s, then learn or teach someone how to use it.
Some of my most popular classes now are on how to harness Evernote to keep track of genealogy sources, online and print content, photos, research notes and all those other essential bits that can haunt you when you can’t put your hands on them. And all the options available for Evernote mean you can synch and access your stuff across several devices and computers: it’s available for Windows and Mac systems and there are apps for iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch, Android, Windows Phone and Blackberry. PRICE: Free.
Evernote Smart Notebook.
Even the most paper-free researchers still need to take handwritten notes sometimes. Make your notes easy to scan and integrate into your Evernote software with this notebook. The notebook paper is lightly gridded to make it easier to scan the pages nice and straight. But the real genius of this notebook is the accompanying “smart stickers” you can put on each page. These stickers have icons that become searchable digital tags when scanned. These tags make it easier to identify and synch your notes with other material you’ve tagged in Evernote (by surname, location, person’s name, etc). PRICE: $19.95.
Evernote for Windows for Genealogists Quick Reference Guide
This is my newest publication! Evernote users (and those who want to be) appreciate having an at-a-glance tutorial, tricks and shortcuts for using this free and essential software for genealogy. Evernote helps genealogists keep track of their source material–and my laminated Quick Reference Guide helps genealogists do it smarter and faster.
Price: $9.95
My Life & Times: A Guided Journal for Collecting Your Stories.
This gorgeously-designed book by Genealogy Gems Contributing Editor Sunny Morton helps the user capture their own life story or someone else’s. The book is organized into natural sections like childhood, family life, career, etc. Each section is filled with thoughtful memory-jogging questions about the past: relationships, events, growing experiences. A spiral-bound format with a bonus CD with extra printable pages makes the book flexible to anyone’s life: remove or add additional as needed to tell your unique story. The introduction and the beginning of each section offers compassionate and sound advice on topics like how to improve the quality of memories, understanding memories, what to do with difficult memories and more. PRICE: $29.99 (but last I checked it was on sale for $19.99 at Amazon the link above).
Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links and Genealogy Gems will be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on these links (at no additional cost to you). Thank you for supporting Genealogy Gems!
by Lisa Cooke | Nov 24, 2013 | 01 What's New, Australian, FamilySearch, Findmypast, Irish, Records & databases
More than 13 million new records recently appeared on findmypast.com, thanks to a new agreement between findmypast parent company DC Thomson Family History (formerly brightsolid online publishing) and FamilySearch International.
Among these millions of records are “major collections of births, marriages and deaths covering America, Australia, and Ireland,” according to a FamilySearch.org press release. Millions more records from about 600 additional collections are yet to be added. findmypast hopes these records will help current subscribers and allow the company to expand to non-English-speaking markets.
The FamilySearch press releases describes the overall purpose of the collaboration as delivering “a wide range of projects including digital preservation, records search, technological development and the means to allow family historians to share their discoveries.”
