Social media is fast becoming a great history resource for those of us who are hunting for information to include in our biographical stories. There is nothing more powerful than a couple of people on a social media page posting old pictures and talking about old times that they share with their friends and family, who in turn also comment and post more pictures and share with their friends and family. Eventually, those post can reach around the world and bring together a wealth of information that you will not find from conventional resources available in books, in the library or even with your immediate family members.
The computer, laptops, smartphones, digital scanners, digital pictures, the internet and better software all help us get old pictures and records scanned into a digital format that we can use and share with people from around the world. Microfilm and microfiche use to be all the rage in converting paper documents into a format that would last a long time. Slowly, but surely, those are being converted over to digital format and Acrobat PDF files that are scalable to aid in looking a very tiny print and making it larger. It also captures the best possible resolution of the pictures from these pages. Of course, it would be tremendous if the original papers and photos could have been scanned into digital not long after creation. Wouldn’t it be sweet if we could go back in time as shadowy observers and scan in all the documents and pictures that have been lost over the years?!?!?
Several years ago we were preparing for a family reunion and I was “voted” into creating a contact list and gathering baby pictures and current pictures of everyone who was coming. I friended every single family member and checked their friends’ list and friended those people and so on until I had about 300 people then I started posting updates on the Family Group page and added each of these people to the group. They invited other family members to join and we all posted old pictures. It was great because each of them was able to type up who was in the pictures and about when they were taken. By the time the family reunion started, we had a complete family tree with current pictures of almost every single member of that branch of the family. Even though not all of the family could attend we had webcast going so that those who couldn’t attend could dial in and speak to everyone else. A perfect opportunity to gather stories for future remembrance pages and the biographies you might want to write.
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