Why it Starts with Story
Stories are at the heart of family history. They answer the “why” questions that motivate us to spend time digging into our own history.
Originally published to postPonga.com on June 7, 2023
Stories are at the heart of family history. When we reach a stage in life where our professional careers are wrapping up and our children are grown, many of us reach for long-delayed family history projects.
Stories answer the “why” questions that motivate us to spend time digging into our personal family history. They send us to genealogy libraries, county records, and newspaper databases in search of answers.
Sometimes it’s just a physical thing as piles of boxes start getting in the way, but more often it doesn’t actually get started until something happens. We might simply be downsizing, but more typically it’s fueled by strong emotions like love, fear, or grief that surround events like weddings, illness, or funerals.
The Natural Link to Stories
Our human brains form understanding through connections that explain and connect through stories. Think back to how many times you’ve mentioned an aunt’s name, and then explained to a friend or spouse who might know her, that “she’s the one who…” These “the one who” taglines are like verbal links that connect one instance (like a mention) to a story.
Whether motivated by an urge to organize, celebrate, or grieve, our communication patterns are guided by familiar narratives. Our most important stories are universal. They’re the sweet joys of birth, love, and connection. The deep sorrow of grief, or the complex emotions of guilt, and regret. Stories help us explain and communicate these emotions for ourselves, and past generations.
A History of Family Stories
We’ve been documenting family stories since the dawn of history, so it’s not surprising that consumer technology companies have mined the practice for new business models. A recounting of history helps center today’s innovations.
Historically, family histories were passed down through church, village, or community records. I have personally inherited precious family scrapbooks and albums with newspaper obituary clippings, handwritten recollections and old photographs of ancestors long passed. Some families have family bibles passed down with children’s names captured for posterity. Perhaps you have some of these precious documents yourself.
By the mid-19th century, as photography and publishing became less expensive, families could pass their stories down with collections of old photographs. Some families self-published books capturing details of their family history and those they’d learned from their research. Today, family history and genealogy libraries today are tremendous repositories of these original publications and many are now also accessible through Archive.org and the Digital Library at FamilySearch.org.
By the late 19th century when photography became less expensive and more accessible to ordinary families, collections of these photos became a key part of family history collections passed down along with other precious heirlooms like jewelry, tableware, and embroidery. By the mid-20th century when photos had been passed down for generations, it wasn’t unusual to find hand-written annotations on prints and albums to capture names and connections, “Sally’s son Jeremiah,” for example. (Sometimes this was delicately done on the back in soft pencil, but unfortunately, sometimes in ink on the front too.)
By the end of the 20th century, as photo printing became inexpensive and accessible, it was quite natural to want to compile albums for special occasions like new babies, graduations, and weddings. Double prints (a discount on the second print at the photo processor) were readily accessible at this point. By the early 21st century, self-published photo books with an increasing array of features and automation came out. Printed books added something extra special because they made it easy to add captions and more for context. As an easy-to-produce souvenir from an event, it created a physical manifestation of the personal connection.
The only challenge was a way to distribute them easily. As paperback photo books became available they were less expensive than individual glossy prints or hardcopy books, but they were still expensive. Price pressures (and diversification) expanded options to include photo cards, printed mugs, blankets, and more.
Whether as studio-designed Daguerreotypes and cabinet cards, or photo books and Facebook groups, families have always reached out to the latest in consumer technologies to help them capture and preserve their family stories. Looking at that historic progression, you can see how compelling the invention of photography was to family storytelling — and how it’s continually evolved to meet consumer demands.
Stories and Digital Family History
A family history story can be conveyed in almost any imaginable form. Today, you can hire a professional team to help you with bespoke personal memoirs, films, or even VR depictions that will remain accessible to descendants long after you’re gone.
It’s hard to know where to start.
Though now offline, the Ponga software entered this market at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic with a very different approach. Ponga’s albums, pictures, and annotations created new ways to capture stories hidden in family photographs and documents. With linked media, the platform created a form that was fully digital and interactive.
Since launching Projectkin.org, out post-Ponga community, I’ve stepped back to think more deeply about how digital technologies are affecting the collecting and sharing of family history stories. The invention of the web over 30 years ago created new ways to work with the prints, slides, and documents left behind by our ancestors. Today, the AI-fueled innovations that have come to market in the last six months are already transforming how we put these materials together.
It’s not too soon to consider how innovations will affect how we capture our own stories. Treasured objects passed from one generation to the next have always connected personal and financial value to provenance. In a sense, these details of the source operate in a way that’s not unlike academic citations. One of the biggest issues affecting families passing down digital artifacts has been the preservation of metadata. Like the create-date and file-type information for an ordinary file, this information can provide vital details about the image or other digital artifact.
Unfortunately, without careful management, this detail is easily lost with simple transactions like copying files or moving them between platforms. Ironically, technology has muddled sources for generations. In the 1950s, my grandfather, a talented engineer, and amateur photographer, made optical copies of Daguerreotypes he’d inherited and added them to elegant gold-leaf frames from the 1890s. Why not? 🤔
This old problem is now on steroids. Manipulated images and lost metadata can distort facts and fabricate origins. It can also create problems for authenticity, privacy, preservation, and more. Our modern tools haven’t created a problem, they’ve simply opened a new crevasse in historical complications.
5 Essential Elements of Digital Family History
In an earlier post, I described what I believe to be the 5 essential elements anyone should keep in mind in working with digital artifacts in family history projects. I find it useful to sort the five into two categories, enabling and empowering elements.
Enabling: These first two are enabling in that they make the whole exercise of family history not only possible but also preserved for future generations:
Digital: I call this out as a separate category because it’s so important to think about how something is digitized — AND how that digital artifact refers back to the original. This implies not only the point about metadata but also the documentation to connect digital and analog versions. This is a topic Kathy Stone covers in her ongoing series of events, Kathy’s Corner.
Archived: I include archived here because it’s critical to the historical importance of the digital artifact. Once scanned, the original needs to be preserved as carefully as possible with as much of its provenance and context protected as well. Beyond physical archiving of the original materials is a strategy for protecting and archiving the original digital files even as copies are modified, cropped, or manipulated for specific purposes.
Empowering: These elements are transformational in the sense that they start with the artifact and add value to create or convey new forms of information:
Storytelling: Creates a way to tell stories in a digital world that may include connections to networked content, new media, and more.
AI-fueled tools: In that original post I’d originally described this as “facial organization” such as we implemented at Ponga, but today I think of this more as AI-fueled tools to generate, manipulate, and manage content. Family history, like other kinds of content, will include images and documents. They are much easier to work with when organized by faces, topics, and places. Further photo editing, watermarking, and even illustration will enhance your ability to communicate your stories. These kinds of things can be better accomplished with AI-fueled tools.
Private yet shareable: I believe it’s critically important for each individual to control their own story. The story you tell depends on who’s in the room. True stories need a private, safe space. Their meaning is enhanced by sharing them in a family but that also requires control — essentially control over an invitation list.
Digitizing old family photos and other artifacts brings them into a world where they can easily slip away. Once on a public stage, the stories are transformed into performative events that sap them of their personal meaning or family significance. In context, these kinds of stories are pearls that need to be protected and preserved so that future generations can appreciate the complicated choices, sacrifices, and love that made their lives possible.
The Story Left Behind
From a hierarchy to a haiku, stories take many forms. Many people focus their family history effort on the stories they’ve heard or — these days — gleaned from oral histories or Internet research. So often, photos are seen as simply illustrations of a story told elsewhere.
While completely valid, it’s a form that adheres to the traditional limitations of printed books. When you consider digital platforms, your story can be conveyed in any number of interactive ways. For example, you might guide an explorer through the details in a photo such as who was there or what happened in that moment as gleaned from clues in the background. The story might be told as annotations, or perhaps as a digital film — or some combination of both.
You might also combine imagery and written stories with sounds, voices, and music. As anyone who has ever put together a yearbook, school newspaper, or scrapbook knows, the visual arrangement of images on an album page can tell a story — as does the order in which they appear in a linear medium like film or a podcast.
Any ordered collection helps contextualize a story. The hard truths and difficult stories can be conveyed, even if they aren’t spelled out. It can create a context for new generations, fluent in digital media, to stitch stories together themselves — as they are ready to appreciate them.
Just as order can tell a story, so can disorder.
Unfortunately, though a story hidden in disorder might be fascinating, it’s also likely to be forgotten. If you’ve ever helped a loved one downsize, you can appreciate the problem. Precious family moments can easily become cheap stock photos traded at a thrift store. The Dead Fred site is full of such photos longing to find their families.
Order can be as simple as filing by time, people, and place. It might also be a consistent narrative order such as is traditionally done when all of your photos fit into a single album. There are innumerable ways to capture that order from shelving and media to file naming and metadata. Each wraps packaging around the essence of historical events, people, and places.
Family History as a Service?
The modern, digital world of smartphones, social platforms, and AI has transformed what it means to share a story too. Supported by lucrative subscription or advertising business models, online platforms have started to change our expectations of what it means to pass down family stories. These compelling platforms offer not only places to create and capture your family story but also to weave it into a larger family tree crowdsourced by cousins and going back centuries.
These innovations are, in my view, neither good nor bad. I think online family trees create ways to separate the heartfelt emotions about family bonds from the facts of descendency and genetic relationships. While I appreciate the power of converting a family tree into prose, I think that saps a story of life. You’re left with all the emotion of a hackneyed greeting card. There’s a special place in our psyche for complex emotions expressed in unique, if imperfect, forms. Homemade Mother’s Day cards prove it. 🥹
How a story is shared is also continuously reinvented. Ask any teen who’s developed a talent for social media to explain the art. Each creation builds on the memes and forms that preceded it. Each new form adds layers of context and meaning. The constraints of form can inspire creativity. From print, film, animation, and now AI-fueled AR/VR we can look ahead to entirely new ways to explore our very old stories.
Technology will never “do” family history for us.
Experience, however, tells me platforms will try. A range of modern tools will automate tasks that will make it easier and easier for us to see the stories hidden in our family histories. Honestly, I think that’s a good thing. We’re already seeing AI-based tools evaluate published family trees to spot inconsistencies and duplications. The tendency of these tools to confabulate details is worrisome so it’s up to us to spot errors, refine details, and share the stories that matter. Our media literacy and ability to add relevant context will ensure that these stories continue to share our human connection for generations to come.
Our post-Ponga Community has a Role to Play
I’ve organized the tools of our post-Ponga community around these five elements because I can see how AI-fueled tools are pushing us into another period of rapid change in software. Having built my career in one crucible of technology I’m excited for access to new toys. I’m also wary of the significant potential for technologies to distort emotions and disconnect them from facts. I hope this community can contribute the insight and tools to help us all manage through the transition to the modern sharing of family history in digital forms.
If you’re interested in how technology will affect explorations in family history as artifacts are digitized, we’d love to have you join our community. I look forward to your contributions through events, articles, and conversations here in our Projectkin community.
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