Storytelling, Projects, and Hanging out with Family Historians
With the annual RootsTech conference ahead, let's talk about why it matters, and why it is personal to me.
I first met many of our early Projectkin members as one of the co-founders of Ponga.com. As Ponga, we’d built an incredible new way to share family stories in pictures then released the software at the height of the pandemic. It was 2021 and the first virtual RootsTech1 show. After the global shutdowns of 2020, the annual conference had been reimagined as global event with over a million attendees registered.
Fast-forward to 2024 and our beloved Ponga platform is offline, and our Projectkin community has blossomed. We’ve growing consistently each month, attracting members hungry for creativity and encouragement to tell their stories. I’ve been transformed as well. I started out as a nerdy technologist thinking I had something to teach people. I’ve morphed into a committed family storyteller with some tech chops — and a lot more humility.
With the RootsTech show reopening as a hybrid program in just a few weeks, I thought it might be a good time to circle back to the role I see for Projectkin in the world of storytellers, projects, and family historians. I’ll close with a sneak peek at what I’m cooking up for the show. 👩🍳
Old family photos & stories
I fell into the startup world out of a fascination for how we connect through photographs. My first exposure to my own family history had been through the old photos my mother had in her own collection. We lived overseas when I was a kid and I’d had little exposure to cousins and grandparents. I didn’t get much in the way of stories from mom, but I did have a self-published book of family history my grandmother wrote a decade before I was born.
So, if I have a book, the hard part’s done, right? [Like so many technology endeavors, it began naively.]
Over the course of building, delivering, and marketing Ponga2, I developed a deeper appreciation both for the power of old photos and for the explosion in tools enabled by modern computing and the internet. Ponga could connect text, video, and media to any selection in an image. It was amazing — but that was just a start.
Projects
When I left Ponga behind, I turned to focus on my own family stories. Soon I realized both how little I actually knew. Taking the advice of archivists, historians, and storytellers I started to realize how I’d misunderstood the context for many of our own photos. I had to dig in and explore original documents and follow the cookie-trail created by my grandmother’s book..
After my mom passed in 2022, I started to glean a new perspective into my family story:
Video: Created in 2022 for Ponga media channels, the link is no longer active.
It didn’t take long to see the potential in building on the community we’d started as Ponga. We needed a platform-independent place to…
Build and share the best ideas.
Teach each other how to explore projects unshackled from platforms but leveraging the best in technology techniques and tools.
Coach and encourage each other in best practices like archiving and citations.
Inspire each other with challenges and exposure.
The Project structure at Projectkin is meant to reflect the potential in storytelling. Stories have always been told in countless ways ways. Consider the greats penning sonnets and plays, crafting film and memoirs. With a mere 30 years of experience since the blossoming of the web, we have a lot to learn about using digital interactive tools to tell our stories. We’re still figuring out how apply these tools to tell stories in old fashioned forms like memoirs and essays.
Writers & family historians
After a search, the Projectkin community has found a home on Substack. Here, our members can mingle with professional and aspiring writers, many honing their craft in the written word.
Our timing was convenient, too. Days after our launch, Substack released an incredible series of media features. To produce and share video a few years ago might have taken large paid storage resources and expensive editing and transcription tools. Today, these are free and include public or private distribution on Substack and other platforms.
Whether written, interactive, oral, or performed, we now are attracting a critical mass of family historians. These are people who share an interest not in a religion or ethnicity, and instead simply family roots.
Knowing who came before us and the challenges they survived, gives us the resilience to tackle the modern world.
A peek 👀 at what’s coming at RootsTech
So that leads me back to RootsTech 2024. Throngs of attendees will mingle in the expo halls and ballrooms, while hundreds of thousands more will explore the courses, product announcements, and gossip on the RootsTech.org site. If it’s all new to you, I’d highly recommend attending if you can in person or online. As a bonus, today’s free online ticket also gives you access to recordings dating back a year or more.
As Projectkin, I’m looking to this RootsTech show with a renewed appreciation. I’m empowered with my family history research and the strength of our community to combine these lessons and tools into something we can each tailor to our own needs.
During RootsTech 2024, I won’t be attending live or exhibiting. But, with the help of friends and supporters, I’ve cooked up a few special programs for all of us.
First is a series of six special RootsTech 2024 events
Second is a special program just for members launching at RootsTech 2024
Again, thank you 🥹
However you found us, I want to thank you for coming along with me on this journey. You’ve kept me focused, and you’ve invited your friends. Together, we’ve created very something very special and now we’re inspiring each other with a passion for stories.
Join me in having some fun celebrating it at RootsTech 2024!
Perhaps you’re asking, “when is the show?” You can follow the link to RootsTech.org, but the short answer is February 29 to March 2nd. Classes and the expo hall onsite programming start at 8 AM and run through 5 PM Mountain Time, GMT-7. The online version is completely free and accessible 24 hours, though online booth/chat support is likely restricted on a per booth basis.
If you’re curious, you can see promotional videos about Ponga.com in the archives at the Projectkin channel on YouTube. Reach out to me at projectkin.org@gmail.com if you’d like to learn more.