Social Network: Making sense of WhatsApp Business
January 29, 2018Showcase of real time technology at the winter Olympics
February 12, 2018As I write this week’s column, my mind is quite pre-occupied with authoring a book that captures the life story of my grandfather and his two brothers.
Chennai: Doing this project has been on my bucket list and as a way to help me in the research for the book; I started a WhatsApp group and invited all my cousins and key family members. Lo and behold, you should see how abuzz the WhatsApp group is with activity.
Lots of photos, memories, nostalgia shared. It got our family, some of them thousands of miles apart, together. This brings me to a very important point, the role of technology in helping document our family history and recreate the joint family, a quintessential Indian trait that now seems to fade away. Here are some simple but powerful tools that have helped me and am sure it will be useful for you in your effort to capture your family history.
Shared Photo Album: One of the most important and underrated tools to capture family history are Google Photos. Especially the shared album feature which truly is a Godsend. Let me illustrate this with a real-life example. I created an album on Google Photos and invited my cousins and family members to contribute any old photos that they may be in possession of.
This prompted some of the members to dig out dusty marriage albums of elders from old bureaus and lofts. These marriages are probably the only place where photo documentation happened two to three generations ago. Many of them took photos of the moth-eaten photo albums and shared them on the Google Photos. This very gesture of digitizing the photos from a physical form in the photo album to a digital photo on the cloud meant that the photos are preserved for posterity.
In my own case, the book project became the trigger for many hundreds of photos to move from physical albums to the online album. These make it much easier to share and importantly preserve.
Videos: A powerful family history documentation tool is videos. As I began to research more about my grandfather, I found a rich vein of resource in elderly people in my village. Many of them still remember my grandfather and share a lot of emotion, some even with tears in their eyes. Words will never do justice to capturing their emotions. That’s when I found a simple video set up using my mobile camera to be an excellent way to record people’s stories. This is also a beautiful reminder that we humans are born storytellers and we do a better job narrating the memories than writing them down.
Family Tree: Quite often, we only remember the names of people who are in the preceding two generations. This means that we will have details of our parents and great parents but rarely anyone before that. A good way to go a few generations back is to use a Family Tree Map generator. I tried using one at MyHeritage.com and it uses a very intuitive question and answer style to help fill out my family tree. This prods us to ask some of the elders in our family for the names and it is quite amazing how rich details come out. Filling out a family tree is a good exercise to undertake, especially for the future generations to come. It’s very important not to lose track of our roots. Have you recorded your family history? If not, make use of the technology available for you to take baby steps. Your kids and grandkids will thank you profusely for this while your great grandparents will look down on you with lot of pride.
The author is CEO of Business Blogging, an author, podcaster and an organic farmer. He blogs at www.Kiruba.com and can be reached at Kiruba@Kiruba.com