Create Your Family Legacy

vintage photos

The Create Your Family Legacy series is designed for family historians and genealogists to learn how to take the steps of digitizing your photos, stories and memorabilia. There are four different workshops. Come to one, or come to all four. They all begin at 6:30 at the Dighton Public Library.

Wednesday, September 12: Digital Preservation: This workshop discusses what happens to our digital presence after we pass. How do we preserve it for future generations? How do we save email, Facebook postings, word documents, and pictures? This presentation asks patrons to consider these questions and then begins to provide the answers. Fulfilling the Library of Congress’ initiative to have libraries teach patrons how to create a digital legacy, this class touches upon the best file formats for long term preservation, how to save email, social media pages, and websites. We’ll cover audio and video files and talk about digitizing old VHS tapes, papers, photographs and books. Archivists and the Library of Congress worry that there will be a gap in the historical record of the generation that built the digital superhighway’s infrastructure. This course attempts to close that gap and provide the first generation of the computer age with the necessary tools to create a digital legacy.

Thursday, September 20: Organizing Your Materials: This workshop how to handle all of our stuff. Genealogists and family historians quickly get overwhelmed with the amount of family memorabilia they amass. Learning about the best storage enclosures, environmental controls and digital file formats is a great start, but if all that material isn’t stored properly, access can still be unmanageable or impossible. Using the tried and tested principles archivists use to organize and retrieve massive amounts of information patrons will learn how to create a true archive for their family collections.

Thursday, September 27: Storytelling: This workshop encourages us to share our family stories. Everyone has a story. Some people want to tell their own story, others want to capture the story of someone in their family. This class outlines many ways people can tell story. We’ll discuss setting up a family Facebook page, blogging as a way of storytelling, how to create a memory book or do an oral history. For those inspired to write, we’ll discuss the differences between writing an autobiography, memoir or a book of essays and present creative ways of using journalling as a storytelling device.