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For as long as I can remember, there’s been a large oval portrait hanging in my grandmother’s house. They’ve always had a number of photos up and this one blended in a bit. I had a general idea that it was someone’s grandmother, but just like the Chinese scrolls and the Disneyland silhouettes of my mother and her sisters, the portrait faded into the comfortable chaos that was my grandparents’ home. Finally, as an adult, I asked my grandma who exactly the portrait was of. It turns out that it’s a portrait of my grandmother’s grandmother (her father’s mother), who is...

I’ve been working on my stepfather’s genealogy as I’ve been filling out the family tree and I recently did a photo session that I thought might be helpful for some of you. Like many people, my stepdad has things that have been passed down to him from his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. Some are things that are so worn and old they were actually rescued from being sent to the thrift store, so these aren’t necessarily the kind of things you would have out on display in your house. Additionally, if you aren’t the kind of person who would display...

Here’s a fun family history project you can do to celebrate a birthday. On my most recent birthday, we constructed a timeline from 0 to 32 and I had Eva help me take photos out of our photo box to arrange them chronologically. I wanted to show her that I was once a baby and then an almost-four-year-old like her, but I had grown up and up and up to the ancient age of 32. She got a kick out of guessing how old I was in each photo and also had a lot of great questions about things that...

After my grandfather passed away, he left behind a box of 8mm and Super 8 film. It’s been floating around in my family’s possession for the last few years because we couldn’t bring ourselves to send it away to be digitized but we also didn’t have a projector that worked for the film. I researched out options and determined that we could either send the film away to be digitized, drop it off at a local center, or convert the film at home. All of these options were pretty expensive because we had about 40 reels of film and services...

Do you have slides sitting around passed down from your parents or grandparents? We discovered boxes and boxes of slides after my grandfather passed away and I was eager to scan them since I knew I had never seen the photos. Well, you might be able to figure this out on your own, but when you put a slide in a regular scanner, you will get an image of exactly what you’re looking at…a cardboard frame and a piece of film that’s too small and dark to see. Lame. It turns out that you need a scanner that projects light...