Family historians, hooked on stories
These are stories of a family’s journey. Objects, letters, and voices take them through migrations, tragedy, and triumph to teach family lessons of empathy and resilience. These stories matter to families today — and into the future. It's our responsibility to capture, preserve, and pass down.
This is a golden age for storytelling. Families now have a wealth of resources and media options to help them tell their stories. Even the specialized requirements of family history like document preservation, material archiving, and future-proofing, are easier than ever — if you know about techniques and tools.
Here at Projectkin, we’re on a mission to get these stories told. We’re here to help each other find solutions and encouragement.
At Projectkin, we’re here to help each other.
This community is for family historians of all ages, skills, and interests. We meet in an online forum and at virtual events to share ideas, projects, and inspiration. We’re hooked on stories and eager to tell them in ways that will engage our siblings, children, and the generations of descendants to follow them.
We invent and refine creative ways to capture and preserve our stories. Reimagined as “projects,” we can explore ideas independent of vendors. We freely combine our narratives with media, maps, and more.
We’ve flipped the digital platform.
Instead of examining platforms for features and specifications, we focus on stories to be told and audiences to engage. At Projectkin, platforms, tools, and hacks are shared like tips between cooks. 👩🍳 👨🏼🍳.
Once a good solution is found, members share it with the community as a specific, how-to project “recipe.” These recipes follow a consistent template that anyone can understand, with ingredients, tips, and lessons learned. Using the Chat platform here on Substack, community members can add comments and expand on them, perhaps even adding innovations.
What you won’t find.
We are platform-independent, so you will not receive a pitch on any platform, service, or tool. We are not selling anything. That independence allows us to be objective and creative.
It’s a newsletter with benefits.
Dropping your email allows you to receive our articles and recordings via email. If you want to return to create a password and a handle, you can join the conversation with an authenticated identity. This helps us keep the community healthy and avoid the noise of open sites like X, Facebook, or Instagram.
We use Substack to manage emails and delivery. I believe the platform is well-suited to capturing and sharing family history. I’m so committed to the idea that I’ve invested in a collaboration at
to create a “clubhouse” to support family historians and genealogists who are new to the platform.There are rules, though.
As my mother used to say, “Participation is a privilege.” In our modern, online world, written guidelines can be helpful so you understand what we see as appropriate here:
1. Be kind and contribute. Listen to understand. Respond to support.
Our community works best when we listen to each other and helpfully engage with suggestions, tips, and resources. There are no points to score. Respecting opinions, perspectives, and life experiences is the starting point for thoughtful dialogue and comments that contribute.
2. There is no place for hate, threats, or fear here.
We've seen how words can hurt, destroy, and undermine, particularly online. Such behavior is not welcome here. If you engage in it, I'll remove you from the community.
3. My judgment isn’t perfect. It’s what I have.
I may make mistakes in judgment about what violates our guidelines, and I am willing to discuss it offline. My goal here is to build a community; all I have is my sense of what feels right. Kindly respect that.
4. Language matters.
I ask that all of our members be respectful in their language and tone. Candor and authenticity are essential, but so is kindness. Language, dialect, and slang matter, as they can help us communicate ideas and feelings.
Please note that I’ve made a policy of deferring to my members’ and guests’ preferred variations of English in written posts and spoken events. You’ll notice Australian, New Zealand, British, and Canadian spellings of our shared English language used throughout the site. That’s intentional, though the complexity does risk errors. It’d be an honor to fix those 😉.
Once you join
I’ll send you a welcome email with background about what we do and how we do it. Email systems often filter this into Updates (Gmail) or something like that. You might need to search on “Welcome” and “Projectkin” to find it.
Here are a few tips to get started:
I always invite new subscribers to our exclusive member Chat section to introduce themselves. It’s a great way to get to know the community.
Since many of our members are new to the platform, I invite you to explore another publication dedicated to helping Genealogists and Family Historians on Substack,
. We host monthly events, and it’s become a fantastic way for all of us to find each other. Join us!
Explore the publication at MissionGenealogy.Substack.com
Special Events Each Month
Most Projectkin events are hosted online via Zoom. Each Sunday (or Monday across the international dateline from California), I also offer updates using Substack Live. I frequently include my guests in our programs for the coming week. Occasionally, I add special programs, such as our “RootsTech Ride Along,” in partnership with
.For details on upcoming events, please see our Events page:
All recordings of our live events are sent to Projectkin subscribers just as soon as they’re ready.
We do this under the unshakable belief that you will want to join us if you see what we’re up to.
Hang on, how is this all free?
This whole community is born out of a commitment to help families get their stories told. It’s made possible by a new economic model available with this Substack platform. I’m not charging for my own time. I’ve added mechanisms to support operational expenses.
The Substack business model is aligned with mine by offering robust paid options. Their tool includes monthly, yearly, and one-time voluntary contribution options. I anticipate enabling this soon, but it will not be a requirement for participation in the community.
Why this works
In the software business, there’s an expression that “if you aren’t paying for a product, then YOU are the product.” This is a terrific reminder that platforms like Facebook or Google offer robust platforms for free in exchange for data about you that they sell at a tremendous profit to advertisers.
At Projectkin, it doesn’t work that way. After a career in tech startups, I have focused on protecting privacy. I have no interest in advertising or launching a new platform.
I will not sell your data.
I’m not collecting data to sell you something, either. I’ll even show you how tools work — flaws and all.
About Me
Inside the red suit of a “ringleader,” I’m
. Like you, I’m a family historian hooked on stories. Though I’d always been interested in family history, I became serious about it as a byproduct of my previous startup, Ponga. As we wound down the platform, I realized that our subscribers were also passionate about telling stories. What had brought us together was now my mission as well. So, in a post-Ponga world, I formed “Projectkin.org.”As I’ve gotten to know community members, I've come to think of the community as a collective, and my language reflects this. Sometimes, you’ll catch me saying, “we.” However, at the end of the day, I’m the one responsible for this content. More about me on LinkedIn. If you’d like, you’re welcome to grab a time that works for you to speak live over Zoom.
In the online world, it can be challenging to determine when a phrase or topic falls flat, offends, or is inappropriate. If you have any concerns or suggestions, please don't hesitate to reach out to me. I’ve learned to rely on your candor.1
I have two accounts here on Substack: One as
which I generally use to follow personal friends and interests; the other is this one where I’m your “ringleader,” . For Projectkin-related matters, I’d prefer you reach me here:You can also reach me via email at projectkin.org@gmail.com.
Finally, I’ll leave you with my recommendations for other Substack publications you might want to consider and some of the kind words said about Projectkin. You’ll see a selection of three in the current rotation on our welcome page. This uses a feature of the Substack platform, and I’d encourage you to use it for your benefit as well. If you have a publication, just tap the button to add a recommendation for Projectkin — or any other publication you’ve grown to love. I know my colleagues and I would appreciate it. 🙇♀️
I hope that gives you a sense of what Projectkin is all about. Please feel free to contact me with comments, suggestions, or tips.
Again, welcome!
In this highly polarized world, I’ve chosen to not hide my politics. If you know anything about my home in Berkeley, California, you can probably guess which way my politics lean. I occasionally make decisions, such as the position I took concerning our social media strategy, based on this worldview. I value authenticity.
That said, I also endeavor to welcome everyone. Family history can become a common language shared across political, national, and ideological divides. Please let me know if I say or do anything that makes anyone feel uncomfortable or unwelcome.
