Free training · Using FamilySearch · Beginner · 15 min
Memories, the Part Your Family Will Care About
The free, unlimited half of FamilySearch that nobody uses: uploading and tagging photographs, documents, written stories and audio so the whole family can see them.
Free FamilySearch Memories training from Stuck in the Branches: photographing originals without a scanner, uploading and tagging photographs, adding documents, writing family stories, uploading recorded interviews, describing items properly, and privacy for living people.
What you will learn
- Photograph originals properly with a phone instead of a scanner.
- Upload and tag photographs so they attach to every person in them.
- Add documents, written stories and recorded audio to an ancestor.
- Describe an item so it is not a puzzle for the next person.
- Handle living people and privacy sensibly before uploading.
The full written guide
Chapter 1. Welcome
The free half of FamilySearch nobody uses.
Memories, the Part Your Family Will Care About.
Welcome back. Everything so far has been names, dates and records. This guide is about the half of FamilySearch that holds photographs, documents, stories and voices, and it is the half your family will actually care about.
Memories Is Free and Unlimited.
FamilySearch lets you upload photographs, scanned documents, written stories and audio recordings, attach them to the people in the tree, and keep them there. It costs nothing. For a lot of families it is the only place these things exist outside one person's closet.
Chapter 2. The shoebox
Getting the originals out and photographing them flat.
Start With the Shoebox.
Go and get the box. Photographs, certificates, letters, funeral cards, the family bible page, the newspaper clipping somebody folded into quarters in nineteen sixty one. You are about to turn a box that one person owns into something the whole family can see.
Photograph It Properly.
You do not need a scanner. Lay it flat in bright indirect daylight, hold the phone square above it so the edges stay straight, and fill the frame. Photograph the back as well whenever there is writing on it, because the writing on the back is frequently worth more than the picture.
Chapter 3. Uploading and tagging
Photographs, documents, stories and voices.
Upload and Tag the People.
Once a photograph is uploaded you can tag the people in it, which attaches it to each of their person pages. Tag everybody you can identify, including the ones who are not your direct line. That is how a cousin three states away finds a picture of their own grandmother.
Documents Belong Here Too.
Memories is not only photographs. Put the certificates, the naturalisation papers, the discharge papers, the land deed and the obituary clipping in as documents. A scan in memories is permanent, findable and attached to the person, which is more than can be said for the original in the drawer.
Write the Story While You Know It.
The stories section takes plain written text, and this is where you put what is not in any record: how they met, why they left, what the house smelled like, what they did in the war and never talked about. Write it badly rather than not at all. Nobody is grading it.
Record the Voice.
You can upload audio. If you interviewed a relative, that recording belongs here attached to them. A grandchild hearing their great grandmother's actual voice is a different thing from reading a transcript, and in thirty years it will be the most valuable file in the whole tree.
Chapter 4. Describing and checking
Say who and when, and look at what is already there.
Say Who, What and When.
Every item takes a title and a description. Use them properly: who is in it, where it was taken, roughly when, and how you know. An untitled photograph of four unnamed people is a puzzle you are handing to somebody else instead of solving.
Look Before You Upload.
Check the memories already attached to your ancestors before you add anything. Other descendants have been uploading for years. You may find a photograph you have never seen, in which case you have also just found a living cousin who is researching the same family.
Chapter 5. Privacy and backup
Living people, and why this is archival insurance.
A Note on Living People and Privacy.
Material about living people is kept private to your own account, and that is deliberate. Think before you upload something that names, pictures or embarrasses somebody who is still alive, and before you post a document with a living person's identifying details on it.
Memories Is Also a Backup.
The box in the closet is one fire, one flood or one house clearance from being gone. Uploading is not only sharing, it is the cheapest archival insurance your family will ever get. Keep your own copies as well, in two places, as the record keeping guide sets out.
Chapter 6. Tell the family
One link is how the box multiplies.
Tell the Family It Is There.
Once you have uploaded, tell everybody. Most relatives have no idea this exists and will not go looking. Send one link to one photograph. That single message is what turns a solo hobby into the thing the whole family contributes to, and it is where more boxes come from.
Chapter 7. Wrap up
Ten items this week.
Upload ten things this week.
Choose ten items out of the box this week, photograph them flat, upload them, tag the people and write one line of description on each. That is a real afternoon's work and it outlasts all of us. We are here when you get stuck.