Few things combine to unlock memories more effectively than the sensorial experience of food, especially comfort and holiday dishes. In today’s delightful program Cynthia took us through the idea of a storytelling potluck, a topic covered in this post from earlier this year:

Cynthia’s collection of memories and her mother’s recipe cards seem emblematic of family treasures.

We talked about how these recipes, especially the hand-written ones, drew on ingredients and sensibilities at the time. Substitutions might be necessary for modern tastes and pantries.

Surprisingly often, fun and treasured family recipes can turn out to be simple back-of-the-package specials.

Among Cynthia’s tips are to:

* Consider the timing of your event. Scheduling it during a meal, such as dinner might constrain creativity to you have a balance of dishes to serve.

* Be thoughtful in your invitation to guide your guests so they know what you’re expecting and the recipes and stories to plan for.

* Be creative about ways to capture the conversation and stories shared. Cynthia suggested a blank book that might circulate among guests with stories to be supplemented with photos, for example.

* Keep in mind that not everyone has the same level of cooking experience and that terms like cream the sugar or fold in the cheese can be mystifying. Here’s Cynthia’s reference to the comedy, Schitt’s Creek:

Our discussion included

* The differences in points of view between siblings and the subtle ways in which memories can be different. (Tip: This will be a topic of another Projectkin event on July 29th, “The Scoop on Memories.” Learn more here.)

* How a party can be planned around foods that relate to a family heritage (consider the example of soup dumplings, ravioli and other hand-made treats)

* How dietary constraints among guests need to be planned for (tree nuts, shellfish, gluten, and so on.)

Let’s continue this conversation with more suggestions and ideas in the comments below.

One immediate thought we had in the discussion was to create a food-themed Speakers’ Corner event. Would you be interested in sharing food stories with such a topic?

You can share this video with your friends and family to inspire more ideas.

If this was shared with you, consider joining our community. It’s free! Add your email and you’ll get these recordings directly in your inbox.

This is the April 2025 post on Genea-Musings that started this discussion: Using Artificial Intelligence In the Ancestor Biography Creation (ABC).

Projectkin takes full advantage of the Substack platform that is offered to us for free. That allows us to provide community members with project recipes, programming, and vibrant conversations at no cost. Our patrons help support our operational expenses, ensuring that we can continue to offer these programs for free.

Stories are Hard: AI Can Help

As a platform, Substack is home to a diverse range of journalists, writers, and novelists. That’s wonderful for reading, but it can also be a little intimidating if you’re trying to write about your own family. Here at Projectkin, we’re all about encouraging families to get their stories told in any form that works. Today, our program focuses on ways to share these stories, even if you struggle with storytelling.

As a very special guest, Randy Seaver joins us today to share a process he has developed to streamline this workflow. The challenge, as he saw it, was to create…

“a ‘perfect’ genealogical sketch that would satisfy my family members' interest in meaningful stories with brevity, and this genealogist's desire for documenting sourced records with historical context.”

From the start, he felt that if he could readily create eBooks, audio, and video files from the research data he’d created, he could…

“create consistent ancestor and relative biographies that may interest my relatives and descendants.”

Like so many of us, he was focused on ways to interest his family and successive generations in the stories of their shared ancestors.

For many, the stories left behind by grandparents, great-grandparents, and other ancestors are hazy recollections supported by a few old photographs. As genealogists and family historians, we often try to gain a deeper understanding of our ancestors’ lives by anchoring these fragments to genealogical facts. A biographical sketch helps us organize these facts logically to gain a better understanding of the person and their motivations.

The Solution

Randy’s solution is an extraordinary example of what’s possible using a wide selection of the popular AI tools available today. As you’ll see in the recording, Randy is a master musician working the mighty Wurlitzer that is AI today. He shows us that once you move past AI as just a shiny new tool, you’re free to get creative and concentrate on the goal.

Recipe & Resources

In the spirit of “genearosity,” Randy has taken the time to pull details together to share exactly how he goes about this approach, the resources, prompts, and more. You’ll find them all in this nifty (and inspiring) PDF handout Randy prepared for today’s program:

During the presentation, Randy walked through the story of his great-grandfather, Thomas Richmond. To inspire you, Randy’s shared the audio links:

* “Threads of a Lifetime” on suno.com/s/rgjDEHKKU9nWMsNI

* Notebook LM’s AI-produced podcast episode, “The Deep Dive: Thomas Richmond: An Ancestral Biography” notebooklm.google.com/notebook/7accbff2-9847-4ff6-92ce-e94be7bf4f8e/audio?pli=1

So they’re also handy, Randy thought might find this list helpful as well:

* Randy’s Ancestor Biographies List

* Randy’s AI and Genealogy Page

Finally, there was such an interesting discussion in the Live Chat on Zoom during Randy’s program that I thought you might be interested in viewing it here as well.

This approach has the potential to help anyone get comfortable with AI as a tool. You’re more than welcome to share Randy’s project with friends and family on any platform:

When you have a moment, join the conversation in the comments and notes to follow.

I hope you enjoyed this program and the conversation with other members and participants. It’s an example of the kinds of programs we host here at Projectkin. The community is free and platform-independent.

Learn more at Projectkin.org/about, then join us by adding your email below. It’s free and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Do you have questions about Projectkin and how it all works? Feel free to drop me a note either on the Substack platform in the link below or via email at Projectkin.org@gmail.com.

Background: Connecting Through Time

Every family has deep roots. You are lucky if you know where those roots reach. On my maternal side, I have ancestors to thank for records that already take our story deep into the British colonial period in America. Our story is messy. There were difficult decisions, loved ones lost to disease, migrations, and wars. We were lucky. Enough survived so that we can be here to tell their stories.

Since I can lean on the records my ancestors collected, I focus my time on rounding out the stories that connect individuals to the historical and social context of their time.

In my journey, I was smitten by the slightest connection to Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834). It was a brush with a celebrity. This young aristocrat managed to play key roles in both the American Revolutionary War and the French Revolution. As if that weren’t enough, he returned to America a generation later as the “Nation’s Guest.” From August 1824 to September 1825, he ventured on a 13-month journey to all 24 states of the new nation.

That sent me down a “fur-lined rabbit hole.”

I knew I had ancestors in the Continental Army who might have known him during the Revolutionary War. Their children and grandchildren would have heard the war stories. Now, on his geezer tour, it’s pretty likely families would have tried to see him in person and listen to him speak.

His tour was packed with fabulous extravaganzas in nearly every town he visited. Programs included special events for veterans, highlighting the great battles at Brandywine, Bunker Hill, and Yorktown. You can see the fascination with his visit in the mass-produce giveaways, trinkets, and mementos that flooded the market. Many of these artifacts were prized as heirlooms.

Getting Specific About Time

This national story inspired me to build an interactive timeline of Lafayette’s “Farewell Tour.” I wanted such a timeline to help me answer whether my ancestors might have met the Marquis de Lafayette.

Given the event's historic nature, I soon realized that the timeline could be repurposed by other families to explore their connection to the Marquis. Further, the same tool could be modified and applied to any other landmark event that affecting a community. This recipe describes that project & solution.

The Key Ingredient: Data

I was fortunate to receive the gracious support of the American Friends of Lafayette (AFL), an organization formed in 1932 by enthusiastic admirers of the Marquis. Using their thoroughly researched event timeline as a reliable data source, I could correlate my timeline to their published map of the towns along the Marquis’ route.

The Solution: An Interactive Timeline

The approach I used started with a Javascript timeline tool created for journalists by the Knight Lab at Northwestern University. The tool, originally developed for journalists, creates an elegant and interactive way to contextualize a journey with graphics and backgrounders. It starts with a preconfigured worksheet using Google Sheets to produce a timeline in a new link on the knightlab.com domain. The long URL generated from the tool can be unwieldy, so I created an easy-to-remember redirect on the Projectkin.org domain:

This post, “1824-25 Bicentennial: Did Your Ancestors Meet the Marquis de Lafayette?” written in November 2024, proposed the original design for the project but I needed a reliable source of historical data.

That initial post allowed me to demonstrate the idea and gain the support of the American Friends of Lafayette. With their help, I was able to make two important modifications to my original plan:

* I now had a reliable timeline of events to work from supported by the historians at the ALF.

* For maps of the journey, I could defer to AFL’s own at Lafayette200.org.

Inviting Community Participation

To make this effort even more interesting as a community project, I grouped stories from different community members into “event ribbons” along the bottom. All items contributed by members of our community are also color-coded with this dusty green (defined by the hex color, #8EA085).

The first ribbon, labeled “Lafayette Party,” includes events in his journey. The second, labeled “Community Connection,” includes moments when community members’ ancestors might have met the Marquis. Imagine members of a lineage or historical society viewing how their ancestors might have been connected through their participation in programs celebrating Lafayette, the “Nation’s Guest.”

Rephrasing the Problem into an Extensible Solution

I soon realized that the same formula could be applied to any sequence of fast-moving historical events. This means that lineage, historical societies, and a range of community groups connected by a common history can collaborate on a shared timeline. Once established, their narratives can be placed in the same historical context.

The same basic formula could be applied to any historical event. Examples that spring to mind include the English Civil Wars of the 17th century, the colonial period leading up to the American Revolution in the 18th century, and the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in the 19th century. The primary benefit of this timeline approach was the potential for many others to gain from a single investment of time in building the framework.

The open-source nature of the tool I used from the Knight Lab means that different groups can continue to improve on it and share their documentation quickly. Further, since the event-specific detail is compiled in a Google Sheet, no technical expertise is needed to customize it for your community — or a different historical event.

This post complements the recorded presentation and gives you direct access to the tools I used. You can also start from here to create a variation of your own.

Using The Timeline in Your Community

You can use this kind of timeline in your community in many ways. For example, you might…

* Add it to your website as a call to action.

* Share it with subscribers or members in a newsletter.

* Use it as a bonding exercise for a group with a shared connection to the period captured in the timeline.

I was motivated to explore this timeline from a personal fascination with the story. The bicentennial of Lafayette’s 1824-1825 American Tour made it timely. My connection to the nearby town of Lafayette, California, made it a local story, too.

On hearing about the project, my Acalanes DAR chapter invited me to share the timeline as part of their celebrations in the Lafayette Library with a lecture, wreath-laying ceremony, and exhibit. I’m proud to have this opportunity to share this timeline and explore the method of sharing stories.

Interested in leveraging this story for your community group — or one you know of? Let me know! I’d love to help.

At Projectkin, we’re all about sharing storytelling forms suitable for family history. As is often the case, implementing a form can involve technical components and be intimidating. To dispel that, I boil the form into the tactical steps necessary to reproduce it, or simply “Project Recipes.”

Generally, our members present their project recipes in live events where we gather to discuss and encourage each other. To see past events and explore our recipes, please see Projectkin.org/recipes.

This recording captured a live event in which I presented this recipe to our members so that they could ask questions. The resulting project recipe and the slides used for this Lafayette Project presentation are below:

Project Recipe

Slides

Acknowledgments

I would not have been able to pursue this project without the unwavering support of my sisters in the Acalanes Chapter of the DAR. Particularly the encouragement of our fantastic genealogist, Vanessa Crews, and the unbending support of our remarkable chapter regent, Terry Lucido.

When I introduced the idea, Terry immediately saw the potential for our celebration of Lafayette’s story for our local community in Lafayette, California. She put me in touch with the American Friends of Lafayette (AFL), who are already partnering with the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) in this national celebration. Their tools and resources have been indispensable to telling this story.

Finally, I’m deeply grateful for the potential Patti McLay saw in this project. As National Chair of the DAR’s Franco-American Memorial Committee, she gave me access to the hard work of academics who’ve been telling Lafayette’s extraordinary story for generations.

I was honored to have this timeline be a part of our program celebrating the contributions of the Marquis in our town of Lafayette, California (map). Learn more about what we’re up to at Projectkin.org/lafayette.

If you’re intrigued by this project, why not join us at Projectkin? It’s a free community with live events, ideas, and discussions hosted on Substack. More at Projectkin.org/about.

This project was a variation on my first Project Recipe, “Project Recipe: A Map, Timeline, & Story: Two Ways.” I was visiting my brother and his family at their beach home in North Carolina and wanted to bring him a gift that might express my fascination with our family history. His home was just a few miles from where our shared Quaker ancestors had lived in the so-called Dismal Swamp area of the Albemarle Sound over 300 years ago. The project had two components:

* A digital collage that was printed and framed.

* A view and comment link to the digital collage.

Soon after I presented it, I realized that my audience would want to explore the collage. But, since it was a gift, I didn’t feel right sharing it as a demo. Instead, I prepared this variation that you’re more than welcome to explore. I was delighted to be able to share it through the NWIGS.

To support that presentation, I prepared this handout:

The handout refers to these two links:

* Project Recipe that describes the details of exactly how this project was prepared, Projectkin.org/indiana-recipe

* A digital link to the Canva digital whiteboard used for the interactive collage, Projectkin.org/indiana

And these are the slides I used.

You’ll find our growing collection of Projectkin Project Recipes here:

If this approach to storytelling is new to you, join us and learn more. It’s a free community, we’re all just hooked on stories. Projectkin.org/about

After watching Lori’s film, several audience members engaged in a lively discussion, sharing family stories, recipes, favorite Substack publications, and more. To start us off, Lori shared two recipes mentioned in her story:

Shared in the discussion, publications highlighting food memories, recipes, and family stories:

* Ruthtalksfood Newsletter (by Ruth Stroud)

* The Recipe Graveyard (by Hannah | A Feral Housewife)

* Culinary History is Family History (by Lori Olson White)

* My Vintage Cookbooks (by My Vintage Cookbooks)

* Soulspun Kitchen (by Erin E. Moulton)

* Seafood Savvy and Long Live the Recipe Box (by Cynthia Nims)

The discussion bubbled up many memories, among them:

* Springerle cookies

* German Pork Hocks

And books about food, family & culture:

* 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement by Jane Ziegelman

* Sweet Land of Liberty, The History of America in 11 Pies by Rossi Anastopoulo

* The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: A Search for Food and Family by Laura Schenone

Kerri Kearney joined us and referenced her Project Recipe for a five-generation family cookbook. She’s now in the process of updating to be able to include edits and copies for more family members.

Then there were those favorite family recipes that turned out to be those classics on the back of the package:

Ocean Spray’s Cranberry Orange Relish:

Toll House Cookies:

Are there more publications you’re aware of? Add them to the comments!

Thank you so much for exploring these stories with us. If our Projectkin Community Forum is new to you, we’re delighted to have you. Learn more about coming events and consider joining us!

All events are free and freely shared with our community, friends, and neighbors.

By subscribing to Projectkin, you’ll be sure to get these recordings in your inbox just as soon as they’re available. Learn more at Projectkin.org/about.

Though we welcome small coffee contributions, one of the best things you can do to support us is to tell your friends by sharing this post or the publication. If you have a publication, you can also recommend Projectkin Community Forum, The Lost & Found Story Box, or any of the other publications above. Share the love by going to your own “Add Recommendations” page and, well, add recommendations!

By including “blurbs” to say why, your recommendation may appear on their /welcome page. Nice!

Finally, let me leave you with one last clip. As many of you know, Projectkin now does a live program each Sunday (Monday on the far side of the International Date Line see your local time) to highlight the week’s upcoming events. This past week, Lori Olson White was my guest:

Take a listen, note the past note for context, and kindly boost the Note with a ❤️ or comment. Maybe our Substack hosts will see our enthusiasm and grant us a “Genealogy” category (or label). Thank you so much! 👋

Lynda weaves her directions into today’s video presentation as a project recipe. You’ll find her slides here:

Additionally, her slides included a couple of videos. First, a book with a tab binding she used to celebrate “Bampie and Mayo.”

Lynda further referenced a fabric book she put together to celebrate the visit of friends in a “Recycled Jeans Fabric Book,” This is the video she played during her talk. You’ll find more of her videos on YouTube @LyndaHeines

During the conversation that followed, further resources were referenced, including:

* A source for fabric for printing from inkjet printers:

* June Tailor on Accuquilt

* Inkjet Fabric Printables

* Shared by Mary Roddy from the Quiltmaker Homestead on YouTube

* “Printing on Fabric using Freezer Paper with FREE download”

* “Printing on fabric with a color laser printer - my experiment”

* Other tools detailed in her presentation include:

* Fabric, vintage linens, etc

* Felt or batting for inside

* Glue stick or fusible sheets

* Scissors, cutting mat

* Sewing machine or hand sewing supplies

* Iron

* Optional: paint, micron pens

You’ll find Lynda’s substack at Heines Sight. You can also reach Lynda directly via a direct message on Substack (visit Substack Chat, select the new icon, and enter Lynda Heines). You can also email her directly here: 👇

Was this shared with you? Subscribe to become a member and get these recordings delivered directly to your inbox.

Projectkin is an active community of family historians and genealogists hooked on stories. Our posts and recordings are free, and we’d love to have you join us to explore your own stories.

Learn more about the community at Projectkin.org/about.

From our start in 2023, the Projectkin Community has been incredibly generous with their ideas and projects to share. I’ve only rarely had the chance to share a project recipe. I started on this idea soon after joining Substack. The more I worked on it, the more I appreciated its potential. This could be important for you, too. Let me explain.

As consumers, we’re often lured into platforms whose business models require us to compromise our privacy. Advertising models famously have this as the core exchange. For my family archive, I decided that privacy was non-negotiable. The story you tell is affected by who is in the room. The solution I came up with had to ensure a reasonable level of privacy for storytelling.

In building Projectkin.org, my commitment to privacy and platform independence led me to realize that I could use my development experience to help fellow genealogy travelers create private storytelling spaces. I hope this is helpful to you, too.

Combining platforms

Today’s talk brought together two core elements of that private storytelling effort:

* The WeAre.xyz family history archive is private by default, though you can configure pages as public blogs.

* Substack as a multimedia-rich, yet potentially access-controlled, newsletter.

Putting the two of these together creates a pathway for private storytelling that’s also archived. This has great potential for families. That’s what this solution is all about. As I described during our event (and as you can see in the recording above), I’ve prepared a few resources for you to use to recreate this for yourself.

This assumes you’re comfortable creating materials and generally playing with tools like Substack newsletters and WeAre.xyz for your archive.

Ingredients

As I explained in the presentation, you are more than welcome to explore this recipe using your own “ingredients” (specifically, different archive or outreach tools). In fact, if you do, we’d love to hear about it. Please add your thoughts in the comments below.

To share these Projectkin recipes, I’ve developed a format that consistently covers the ingredients and workflow. This time, however, I realized that there’s more detail to provide about configuring your Substack for a “private” podcast that is non-obvious, so I’ve created a separate “detail” document with step-by-step instructions:

Since it’s also helpful to have a copy of slides, I’ve provided those here as well. All documents are in PDF format though with so many illustrations the files can be quite large.

Was this post shared with you? It’s free. Why not subscribe and get the next post and all of our Projectkin event recordings sent directly to your inbox?

I hope you have enjoyed this program. Feel free to add questions and comments below, and if you’re interested, you can also explore the discussion in the Substack chat.

I will add that based on a question asked in the chat I didn’t notice till after the program ended, I added a slide to answer a question about whether we were “Just linking” to video. Also note that this post itself is an example of a video post. — Great question, Stacey Sherman, Photo Manager.

We’re coming up on a busy season of events for Projectkin. To see what’s coming up next, please visit —

The core of her approach starts with the medical conditions impairing memory formation. For many kinds of dementia, short-term memory or recollections of recent events can be difficult or even impossible. Memories of childhood can remain quite familiar.

Jude’s approach focuses on the remaining long-term memories, using the tools of a genealogist to find cues for conversation in the person’s childhood or known environment of the past. That can mean a shift in worldview for families with loved ones suffering from dementia.

She advocates against focusing on topics like current events or visiting grandchildren, both of which might otherwise seem quite normal. Instead, she advocates for topics related to the loved one’s past, hometown, school, neighbors, familiar smells, music, and other evocative aspects of their past.

Project Recipe

Our project recipe today focuses on this idea and gives you practical guidance on how you might do this yourself. In the recipe below, Jude shares how specially designed memory books can trigger meaningful conversations.

During the program, Jude also guided listeners to consider using this insight to help loved ones who may struggle with cognitive impairments in future years.

In case you missed it, she also covered several of these topics in her post earlier this week:

This very special program inspired an extended conversation that was not recorded in our “after party” that followed today’s program. You can keep the conversation going by sharing insights, remembrances, and questions in the comments below.

You can get a feel for how special today’s program was from the conversation in the concurrent chat session transcript here:

While we cannot share the slides, Jude has prepared this detailed handout, which includes some of the presentation's most salient references and detailed notes.

We’re delighted to make Jude Rhodes’ Project Recipe available free to those who might consider this approach for a loved one.

Again, many thanks to Jude Rhodes, and to all of you who joined today’s special program. Learn more about Jude’s approach at her website at storiesofourgenerations.co.uk, on her substack, Stories of our Generations, and in comments here in the Projectkin Community Forum.

To receive these kinds of recordings, resources, and recipes in your inbox, be sure to subscribe as a Projectkin member. It’s free!

Bridget, who also goes by Lady Esi (Bridget) in her performances, shared several resources with us during today’s program, including:

* Windrush Day, each 22 June in the UK honors the contributions of migrants to the post-war economy

* Bruce Castle, the inspiration for the storytelling chair

* Anansi folklore stories from Africa

* During her talk, Bridget discussed building a library of topics you might focus on as starter questions to open a conversation. (More about this is in the recipe below.)

* Childhood

* Family

* Travel & migration

* Career

* Religion

* Relationships

* Children

* Significant life events

* Hobbies & interests

* People/influence 

* Universal themes

In her talk, Bridget explores all sorts of interesting strategies for opening conversations and engaging your reluctant storyteller, most importantly, Asking for advice!

I hope you enjoy the program. This is one of a collection of Project Recipes shared by Projectkin members with our membership in live sessions and recordings. To join us for another live session, explore our schedule of coming events at Projectkin.org/events.

Not yet a member? Join us and receive all posts and recordings as they become available.

Feedback

Today’s program was a bit of an experiment for us. Can you help us improve and innovate by answering a few short questions? (😉 Don’t miss the spot to suggest new program ideas.)

Next Week: Kathy’s Corner

This popular monthly session focuses on a challenge for every family historian: Sorting and digitizing collections of inherited family photos and artifacts. Our speaker, Projectkin member Kathy Stone, has decades of experience as a professional photo organizer and is now working on her family history projects. This is one of our most popular events each month. I hope you’ll join us.

Do you have friends and family who might benefit from our programming at Projectkin.org? We’d love to have you share our work in any way that feels comfortable for you (here’s a nifty button to make it easy👇):

Tap the “Transcript” button to read along or even search the transcript of the recording to pick up on details you might have missed during the live program.

Kathryn was kind enough to share the structure of her talk ahead of time in a form that elegantly fell into a letter to all of us as a community. You won’t want to miss this. As a nod to our Projectkin community, it even includes one of her grandmother Helen’s recipes, a cucumber salad.

During her talk, Kathryn referenced a number of resources you may find helpful:

* “Widows of Malabar Hill,” by Sujata Massey

sohopress.com/books/the-widows-of-malabar-hill

* “Knowing What We Know,” by Simon Winchester

harpercollins.com/products/knowing-what-we-know-simon-winchester

* “Julie & Julia,” 2009 film IMDB link

* “The Anatomy of a Premise,” by Jeff Lyons

www.routledge.com/Anatomy-of-a-Premise-Line-How-to-Master-Premise-and-Story-Development-for-Writing-Success/Lyons/p/book/9781138838857

To learn more about Kathryn, her first book, and other creative work, please visit:

* info@kathryngraven.com

* www.kathryngraven.com

* Facebook.com/Kathryngravenauthor

* Instagram.com/kathryngravenauthor

Note: The conversation triggered all kinds of interesting discussions we’ll carry into other elements of our Projectkin Community Forum, including…

* Ideas for a future event on getting private, self-published books printed. Learn more about this in upcoming events at Projectkin.org/events

* Have ideas for future events we should consider, share them in the comments 👇 or drop me a note:

While these recordings are sent to all members via email, you are welcome to share them with friends you think might be interested in our free community.

As always, if you received this via email and are not currently a member, please consider joining us.

This incredible project resulted in a beautiful full-color, hardcover book of over 175 pages. As a Projectkin project it was not only inspiring, but also instructive as to process. You’ll learn in the recording about how successful this project was in…

* Inspiring extended family members to participate and contribute their own stories to the book.

* Turn the project from an idea into a completed gift (several times over).

* Creating a treasured family heirloom the moment it was delivered.

* Inspiring Projectkin to spin the idea into something for their own families.

Though I expect we’ll continue to build on these ideas, Kerri Kearney shows us how narrowing the scope of a project can help immensely in driving design, production, and narrative decisions

Tap the word “transcript” above to get a searchable transcript of the recording. The recording is about an hour long and the chat transcript below picked up the chat for the period before the hour ended. (Conversation and chat resources continued in our “after party” for another 30 minutes).

Many details are Kerry’s excellent slides below. Feel free to add comments at the end of this post.

Note: The conversation triggered all kinds of interesting discussions we’ll carry into other elements of our Projectkin Community Forum, including…

* Ideas for a future event on getting self-published books printed. Watch for more about that in the Post-Event Members’ Chat on Substack.

* We also came up with a new Chat Topic, “Project Idea Feedback” which will create space for an online version of ideas discussed in Project Clinic Events.

If you missed this event live, and are interested in joining our next Project Recipe Event, you’ll see the full listing at Projectkin.org/events.

RootsTech in two weeks!

The upcoming Salt Lake City-based RootsTech show on February 29-March 2 is creating a great chance to share what we’re up to here at Projectkin.org. We have two special programs coming.

* It’s a Project Party 🎉 Though it’s entirely free to view online, but you don’t get the same excitement as being on the show floor, so Projectkin are stepping up to create a Project Party:

Join us your Projectkin for a fun series of six short talks over three days. Register now to get the details and be on the list for recordings.

* Join me in the Members’ Corner: As we’ve separately shared with members, we have a special program to launch on February 29 that’s exclusive to Projectkin members: It’s an invitation to guest-author a post for the Members’ Corner.

There’s still time to get a piece to be included in this launch. If you miss it, no worries, it’s an ongoing program. New articles released each month.

You’re welcome, as always, to share this post either in email or as a page with friends and family who might be interested in what we’re up to. I hope to see you at another event. 👋

If you haven’t already, subscribe so you get all of these recordings delivered via email.

Whatever the passion or mystery that fueled you in your pursuit of family stories and records, it’s a fair bet that one of your goals is to share your stories and records with future generations. Sindi’s work is focused on just that challenge. The secret, as she shares in this recording, is to know your audience and make Genealogy fun for them.

Sindi’s talk picks up where her book Genealogy Fun While Developing New Genealogists leaves off. You’ll find the transcript for the talk above ☝️ and below 👇 you’ll find a PDF of the slides.

As a fellow Projectkin, Sindi has also shared details about this project in the form of a Project Recipe highlighting the procedural steps and insights she’s gained from creating these projects herself.

In addition to Sindi’s prepared remarks, she also shared a few resources in response to questions:

* American Ancestors’ Family History Curriculum developed by experts for the American Ancestors to help teachers use genealogy in grades 4 to 8. Free.

* Creating coloring pages from photographs:

* ReallyColor.com (fee)

* Canva.com (some features free), ideas and templates

* Creating crosswords and find-a-word puzzles:

* WordSearchLabs.com

* CrosswordLabs.com

* Reusable Sleeves for marking up puzzle pages

* Uline.com

* ArchivalMethods.com

This list is hardly exhaustive. Do you have some resources to suggest? Have questions, thoughts, or comments? Share them in comments below or in the Members’ Chat Room.

This recipe is intended for the benefit of all Projectkin member subscribers. : 

If you’ve managed to find this — and are not yet a member, we’ve caught you at a good time. Join now!

Since so much of family history is about sharing with younger generations, projects for kids has become an important theme for us. Here are two other Project Recipes that might also be of interest to you:

MORE coming events:

Next month, Projectkin member Kerri Kearney returns to share a family history project she created with her kids and extended family “A Family Cookbook Spanning Five Generations.” To get free tickets and learn about more Projectkin events in the coming weeks, see:

Today’s event centered on the idea of an interactive, multigenerational activity and was led by Projectkin member Anna Scheutz. Anna had mentioned these during one of our more creative Project Clinic events. With a few requests, she agreed to share the idea here in a project recipe.

From the recording above and the linked transcript, I’ll call out a few important notes:

* The concept of the “scavenger hunt” can be extended to any number of special situations. What’s important it be engaging and bring the family together with shared connections — some they might not even have all known about.

* While making it a little competitive with teams can spur everyone on to focus on the effort, be cautious about keeping it fun. That can mean constructing teams to balance knowledge and taking care to tell stories of family branches that connect with your audience.

* You can even turn the idea on its head to have it become more of a quiz bowl, trivia contest, Jeopardy event, or more. Always keep in mind that it should be fun or even funny.

* Most of all — have a good time.

Below are links to

* Anna’s slides “Scavenger Hunt for Ancestors” (Tip: includes a fun family recipe for cinnamon buns 😉)

* Anna’s project recipe “Scavenger Hunt for Ancestors” (Tip: includes recipes for Negroni and “Floo Powder” cocktails 🍸as well as Pear refresher and Berry Burlesque mocktails.🍹)

* No chat transcript today as there wasn’t much on there other than real-time instructions.

Have questions, thoughts, or comments? Share them in the Members’ Chat Room.

This recipe is intended for the benefit of all Projectkin member subscribers. If you’ve managed to find this — and are not yet a member, well, good for you. Now that you’re here, wouldn’t you like to become a member and…

The secret to this project is the combination of ordinary playing cards with an online archive to host his stories and of course, Simon's ready with his WeAre.xyz archive.

QR codes connect each card to archive profiles for each ancestor. The archive provides a private and safe place to view the stories themselves. In this example, he's made the profiles public but in a feature of his software, access is constrained to profiles of ancestors in his archive. For privacy, the profiles of living people are blurred out. You could duplicate this approach with any kind of online page, though we love this easy solution for archiving and privacy.

Have questions, thoughts, or comments? Please share them in the comments below.

This recipe is intended for the benefit of all Projectkin member subscribers. If you’ve managed to find this — and are not yet a member, well, good for you. Now that you’re here, wouldn’t you like to become a member? It’s free!

In this event, I introduced the community and our approach and shared several examples you have presented or scheduled. To make it specific, I also included a Project Recipe for a variation on the "Two Ways" gift project I presented in September.

That project was a gift for my brother that combined a framed collage with a QR code that links to a digital version on Canva's whiteboard. Since it was a gift for my brother and his family, I talked about it but didn't give you access to the digital link. This time, I created a variation of that recipe exploring a related story.

Since this one is a little more of a demo can give you all access to the project on Canva, you’ll find it here: Projectkin.org/whiteboard. This should open in your browser without requiring an account or password.

In the video above, you'll see the framed print, and below are the relevant links and downloads.

Project Recipe

Slides from the presentation

Please note, this event and the recording, was made possible by the gracious invitation of the team at the Oakland FamilySearch Center in Oakland, California. Many thanks to Rudiger Wolf and his team for their kind hospitality and warm engagement.

This recipe is intended for the benefit of all Projectkin member subscribers. If you’ve managed to find this — and are not yet a member, well, good for you.

Now that you’re here, wouldn’t you like to become a member? It’s free!

Slides used in the presentation

Project Recipe with detailed instructions (PDF)

Publishing Resources

Kerri included a few resources you might find interesting and helpful: Keep in mind that most self-publishing platforms like Amazon's Kindle Direct publishing or Reedsy, Bookbaby, or others are designed for public publishing so that your book is available to anyone who wishes to purchase it.

The alternative is private book publishing where the product of your publishing is never available to the public. The alternative is more like publishing or printing a photo book. Options include:

* Blurb — which gives you the option to sell your book, but you don't have to.

* Any photo book publisher like Forever.com, Apple, Google Photos and more.

* Canva book publishing

There were so many wonderful moments during the program with takeaways that had me thinking about the sensorial aspects of a book as a means to make a connection. Kerri has some terrific advice for ways to combine books with digital aspects that can connect with voice, video, and more.

I hope you enjoy this program as much as I did. Thank you all for your participation and excellent questions.

This recipe is intended for the benefit of all Projectkin member subscribers. If you’ve managed to find this — and are not yet a member, well, good for you. 

Now that you’re here, wouldn’t you like to become a member? It’s free!

This approach perfectly suits the challenge of combining facts to bring an ancestor's story to life and is the spirit of the Swedish idiom, “Klä på dina förfäder.”

Session Recording

Hearty thanks to Anna Scheutz, our long-time Ponga member and now our first Projectkin member to step up to present a Project Recipe. In this session, she talked about a project she's worked on several ways to learn about and then shared the story of Sofia Charlotta Westlund.

Notes & resources

The following links mentioned during the program may be useful:

* At the beginning of the recording, listen to how Anna describes the initial event that piqued her interest in Sofia Charlotta's story and then how she engaged in the story for a variety of different audiences including other genealogists, and then her own family.

* This particular ancestor of Anna's was remarkable not only for the life she led but also for the fact that her 97 years between 1813 and 1910 spanned not only the Industrial Revolution but also a period of tremendous growth and change in Sweden.

I loved several of her observations, including:

* When you work on a project, realize that they not only bring your subject to life, you can also think of the project itself as alive and constantly changing because you can go back do more research, edit and repurpose the work into a variety of media and audiences.

* Anna talked about how she's used the core elements of Sofia Charlotta's life for a variety of cases from a presentation to her "After Researching" Facebook group, a chapter in a book and now is exploring turning this presentation below into a video and a scavenger hunt for her nephews and nieces.

* On the video, there's a lovely passage at 48:48 where Ann Larkham summarizes the talk and what it's inspired in a gem of a moment. You won't want to miss that.

Tools she mentioned as useful included:

* A Swedish book about History for Family Historians. She suggested looking for similar books in your own area as they provide useful context to appreciate the environment your ancestors lived and and tips for finding more relevant content for your stories. Here in the US, "Genealogists' US History Pocket Guide" is probably an example.

Finally, the resources mentioned:

* Ann Larkham's upcoming 6-part course for the UK Society of Genealogists on Photogenealogy

* eBook publishing too Anna's used for publishing her story in printed form: Reedsy

* You won't want to miss next week's Project Recipe: "Family Trees and Burls-Project recipe for a child’s teaching ebook" with Kerri Kearney on October 5th.

* I'm doing another "Tutorial Tuesday" next week, October 3rd on Canva whiteboards (essentially using the tool as I did in my Project recipe event on Sept 14. See recording below.)

Slides used in the presentation

Project Recipe

This recipe is intended for the benefit of all Projectkin member subscribers. If you’ve managed to find this and are not yet a member, well, good for you.

Now that you’re here, wouldn’t you like to become a member?

This particular project came about on the occasion of my first visit to see my brother and his family at his vacation home in North Carolina’s Outer Banks in the summer of 2023.

On a hunch, I started searching my grandmother’s book for clues about ancestors of ours who lived in the Albemarle Sound area. I knew we had Quaker ancestors, but I didn’t know about how important the area was in Quaker history in North America. I decided to use what I’d learned to assemble a gift for my brother and his family.

Session recording

In reviewing this recording, keep in mind that this was the very first time we’d presented one of these Project Recipe events. These seem important and we’ll continue to refine our approach. See the discussion questions and watch for a thread in chat to engage in the conversation.

Slides used in the presentation

Project Recipe with detailed instructions

This recipe is intended for the benefit of all Projectkin member subscribers. If you’ve managed to find this and are not yet a member, well, good for you.

Now that you’re here, wouldn’t you like to become a member?