Most families have a box somewhere.
Old photographs, cards, newspaper clippings, letters, maybe a few documents nobody's looked at in years. Some things have names and dates written on the back. Others are pictures of people everyone recognizes now, but the names escape you.
Then there's everything we've collected since. Thousands of digital photos, videos on old phones, documents on computers and family pictures scattered across everyone's devices.
Bringing some of that together on an external drive is a great way to start a family archive.
And you don't have to tackle the whole family history at once.
Start with something manageable. Maybe it's your grandmother's photo albums. Maybe it's one box of pictures you've inherited. Or maybe you just want to gather everything that's already digital before you start going through the physical stuff.
Create one project for the family archive and let it grow from there.
Don't Worry About the Perfect Folder System
You need some organization, but there isn't one right way to organize a family's history.
You could have folders for photographs, documents, letters and videos. If the collection gets bigger, you might eventually separate things by decade or by different sides of the family.
Just start with whatever makes sense for what you actually have.
If most of what you're working with is photographs from your mother's side of the family, you don't need to map out every branch of the family before you've scanned your first picture.
You'll figure some of it out as you go.
One thing that's worth doing from the beginning is giving things useful names.
IMG_0047.jpg won't tell anyone much ten years from now.
Grandpa and Uncle Robert at Wasaga Beach - around 1965.jpg will.
And if you don't know who's in a picture, that's fine. Don't guess just to give it a name. Someone else in the family might know later. This is how the project grows over time.
The Stories Matter as Much as the Pictures
This might be the easiest part to miss.
You know who's in an old photograph because you've known those people your entire life. Someone opening the same picture 30 years from now might have absolutely no idea.
So ask questions while you still can.
Sit down with your parents, grandparents, aunts or uncles and go through some pictures. Ask who people are. Ask where something was taken. Ask why everyone was standing in front of that particular house.
You'll probably hear stories that aren't written down anywhere. Save those too. They don't need to become formal biographies. A few sentences can be enough.
Maybe your grandfather built the cottage himself. Maybe your grandmother always made one particular pie at Christmas. Maybe there's a story behind why half the family moved to another town in 1972.
Those things are part of your family's history even if there isn't a document for them.
Check the Back Before You Scan
Old photographs have a habit of hiding some of their best information on the back.
It might be a name, a date, a place or a little handwritten message. If there's something there, scan the back too.
The same idea applies to other things you decide to keep. An envelope might tell you when and where a letter was sent. If you've got an old newspaper clipping, try to keep the name and date of the newspaper with it.
It might not seem important now.
Years from now, when nobody remembers where something came from, it could be.
Keep the Original Scan
If you clean up an old photograph, keep the original scan too.
Crop it. Fix the contrast. Repair some damage. Make a nicer copy to send around the family.
Just don't save over the original.
Storage is cheap. That photograph isn't replaceable.
It's also worth keeping things you're unsure about. If you've already taken the time to scan a picture, there's not much to gain by deleting it because you don't recognize anyone in it today, because someone else might later.
Give the Family Archive a Home
An external drive works well for this because the archive doesn't have to belong to one particular computer.
The drive can become the home for the project.
This is also a good example of what Homescreen was built to do.
You can create a Family Archive project on the drive and keep your photographs, documents and videos in normal folders. But the project can also hold the other things you're collecting along the way.
Maybe you've got a list of people you still can't identify. Notes from conversations with your parents. Questions you want to ask an aunt the next time you see her. A story about the old family house that doesn't really belong inside a photo folder.
You can keep useful links with the project too. If you find an old newspaper archive, cemetery record, historical map or genealogy page, you won't have to hope you can find it in your browser bookmarks three years from now.
Over time, you're not just filling an external drive with old pictures.
You're putting the family's history together.
Write Something for the Next Person
At some point you may want to write a short note explaining the archive.
Someday, somebody else in the family may end up with it and they won't know everything you know about where it came from.
Give them a head start.
Keep Another Copy of the Archive
Once you've spent hours building you don't want all of that work living on one external drive only. Just like you wouldn't want to keep it all solely on one computer hard drive.
Homescreen gives you a couple of ways to make another copy, depending on what you want to preserve.
You can zip and save the individual files from the project to your computer or another drive. That's useful if you mainly want another copy of the photographs, documents and other files you've collected.
But you can also save the full Homescreen project.
That's a little different because you're not only saving the files. You're keeping the project you've built around them too, including the notes, links and other information you've added along the way.
That means if you ever need to bring that project back into Homescreen, you can restore the whole family archive instead of rebuilding it from a collection of loose files.
For a project like this, I'd keep both in mind.
The old photographs and documents are irreplaceable, so make sure you've got another copy of those files somewhere safe. But after spending years identifying people, recording stories and putting the family history together, the project itself becomes something worth preserving too.
After all, that's the part that turns a folder of old pictures into a family archive.
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