Is facebook the only source your future generations will rely on?!

image source: shoebox.com 
This vignette is fun and sad at the same time, but it inspired me to a few reflections...
Today we find ourselves struggling to find info about our ancestors; each and every little bit we find is extremely valuable to us. We look at pictures and we wonder where they were taken, unless we are lucky enough to find info on the back of it, or to have a family member that remembers the story behind it. We try to understand who our ancestors were through the pictures, through their heirlooms, if lucky, through their diaries...
Still, it always feel like we don't have enough information.
Will our descendants feel the same about us?
Many of us share pictures and stories through facebook, blogs and other social networks, but how many of these pictures and stories tell who we  really are?

By the time our descendants will come along, there will be so much information that they might actually get overwhelmed if not bored in the end and not be so interested in our story after all.
Even if they are really eager to know more about their ancestors, and will go through our whole facebook account, what will they find? Thousands of links shared? Copy and paste of other people's status? Games played? A gazillion pictures?
Which of these incredible amount of data will  really tell what we think?
How will they know what was really important to us? How will they learn from our experiences?
How will they know our testimony?

Even in the cyber era, a book will be the true and tested means to pass our heritage on.
When our children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and their descendants will find and go through it, they will understand that if we took the time to put it together, it must have really been important to us.
Whether it is a  hardbound book you publish once a year or every 5 years,  a scrapbook with pages to update from time to time, whether it is a collection of your traditions, of your recipes, of your achievements, of your very own spiritual thoughts, or all of these and  more, I urge you to start writing your personal story, and  take a few minutes every week to describe at least the most important pictures of your life so that your descendants will not have to rely on the cyberspace to know who you are.

A facebook family history story

God bless facebook!
Why this exclamation, you might ask;
Well, I have many reasons, and some of them include:
1) Living on the other side of the ocean from my homeland, I have been able to keep in touch with my family and friend.
2) I have found long lost friends from school
3) Through the creation of last name facebook groups and hometown related facebook groups, I have been able to connect to many distant cousins that I would have never found otherwise
4) It allows me to share pictures with my family and friends in a user friendly way.
5) It has been the means through which I got back in touch with a few of my cousins in Italy.
This last point is what is making me jump for joy right now because I have finally been able to have all the pictures and birth dates of the descendants of my maternal grandparents.
Here is the story.
I left Italy for the USA in 2003, and already hadn't seen this cousin of mine for a while as she had left for the North of Italy a few years before, and when she would come to visit her family in my town, she would stay too little for us to get together, so once I left for America, we totally lost track of each other.
Even if I came back to visit a few times, it was never when she was there.
After years and months of patient waiting for her or her siblings to join facebook, it finally happened last year, it was actually her nephew first, and then his father.It took one more year for me to come to the point where I was finally able to get in touch with the one cousin I had been wanting to talk to for more than 10 years!

The first time I asked her nephew for her email address, even if she had one, it was not a working one, so she never responded to the emails I sent her because she never got them!
I also created a facebook group for the descendants of our common grandparents, but that wasn't moving the waters fast enough.
Finally last week I decided to ask again as I was finishing the 2012 calendar for my mom, and the only pictures missing were the ones of this cousin and her sister's family. Luckily her sister had joined facebook the week before, so it was a matter of asking for her FB friendship, and she already had her family pictures posted on facebook.
This one cousin, the one that I really wanted to find, the one that we had so many things in common, and who was born only 11 days before me, as it turns out, she really doesn't like facebook, but fate (or should I say Somebody up there) wanted that her husband had been working in Brazil since September, so they were using Skype to communicate.
Can you imagine me as soon as my cousin's nephew gave me her Skype username?
I was on Skype in 2 seconds!
I sent her a message, the next day she answered, and finally a day later, we were having an hour plus long video chat talking like these 10 years never went by!
But the pictures, no, she didn't have them on her computer, so she got me in touch with her husband and finally,  TONIGHT, he sent me his family pictures!!!

Yeah!!! It's complete!!! I can publish the calendar for my mom (and mine too)

 (Sorry, cannot show the pages inside the calendar to respect her privacy)

 and then, after I get a little of my cousin's family stories, I can complete the descendants book I have been working on too!

Now you can understand why I love facebook so much(starting today Skype too;)).
While sometimes it can get people frustrated, I really believe that facebook has done so much for genealogy and the more people  realize how to use it in its full potential, especially using groups for people with the same last name, or that come from the same town, the more long lost cousins will be connected.

Do you have a facebook family history story?

Fruits of their Love -AKA- Descendants book

When working on your family history it is only natural to start with what you know which is usually you, your parents, and when in luck, your grandparents.
Fact is, this is not all your immediate Family History. You are part of your grandparents family tree, you are part of the "History of their Future", and so are any of your siblings and their descendants and any of your cousins, their parents and their descendants.
It will have to come a point when you have all of these Family Histories together, because they are indeed part of your own.

I have decided to create a Descendant book for both my set of grandparents. Each descendant is indeed a Fruit of their Love, a fruit of the Santoriello and/or Iannone Family tree.
Since I am going to share it with my cousins in Italy, it is written in  Italian.
It is going to have a page with some genealogical info and some Family History, and a page with the family cluster for each descendant.
Here is how it is going to look:
Nonno Vincenzo Santoriello and Antonia Bottiglieri descendants book:

 "I Frutti del Loro Amore" in Italian means "The Fruits of their Love"

My dad's parents had 6 children, and sadly my grandma died of childbirth, together with her baby, hence I put an angel in place of the baby.

This is part of the page with some of the Family history/ wedding and kids birthday info.

Gerardo Iannone and Michelina Sannazzaro descendats book:

 

My mom's parents had 7 children, and 5 of them had 3 children each who also had an average of 2-3 children each. You can tell that this book is going to have quite a few pages!

 Thanks to the import feature I was able to make the pages for my parents and me and my siblings' family clusters only once in one book, and then import it in the other, since we are descendants of both sets of grandparents:

Naturally this is just a draft, but it gives you the idea.
Right now I am creating it in a softbound 8x8 book, but thanks to the new import feature, I will be able to transform it in any format I want:
8x8 hardcover book,
12x12 hard cover book
or if I want to add new family clusters as my younger cousins start getting married and having children, I could create a post bound album to then fill with 12x12 pages.
To make it more portable, I could make a 5x5 book out of it, or even a 5x5 flipbook or swatchbook(I would need more than one since they come only in 10 pages).
As you can see, I have options;)
The best part of these books, though, it is their purpose as a tool to help me entice my cousins and their families to share photos and info that I haven't been able to get yet, and that for sure I will not find in civil or parish records any time soon.
Here is how:

I created a facebook group for the descendants of my grandparents on my dad side, and one for the descendants of my grandparents on my mom's side.

I added any cousin I know on facebook from each line, and I shared a few pages of the book asking for help in finding the missing info.
In just a day, I got some info on my grandparents and a whole video full of pictures that my cousins made for their dad, which has all of his children and grand children. Not bad!
I still need more pictures and info, but I can already see that my idea is working!!!
Stay tuned if you are curious to know when I will have completed my grandparents' descendants books, and which one is going to be completed first.

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Looking for distant cousins

Today I am going to talk about my husband's family side, more precisely his grandma's father's  side.
We are looking to find distant cousins, descendants of Martin Lorenzo Dow Knight and Julia Judenia White.
We have already found many, but we know there are many more yet to be found and probably pictures that we haven't seen yet.
With the pictures we were able to find and share with each other, I created this Descendancy poster, and I am hoping that looking at the pictures, names and dates somebody will recognize their ancestors and will contact us.
So, here it is:

(click on the image to magnify it)
The Knights were originally from Alabama, and then moved to Tennessee.
Martin Lorenzo Dow was son of Davis (1815-1875) and Sarah(1820-1880) Knight, and among his siblings were
Francis M. Knight,
Elizabeth L. Knight,
Eliza J. Knight,
Jesse Jackson Knight ( who married Julia Judenia's sister, Eustacia Bell (Ada) White),
William M. Knight ( who married Zelphia Almedia Amerson)  and
Mary C. Knight.
If you recognize any of these names as one of your ancestors, please, contact me.
We are also going to have a Knight family reunion, June 25th-26th for all the descendants of Davis and Sarah Knight, and we would sure love to have new distant cousins join us!
Once I have more pictures, I will create a poster for the descendants of each of Martin Lorenzo Dow's siblings, in hope to find even more cousins.