Where to Store Your Family Tree

While working with some people on their family tree, I've discovered that many of them keep their primary copy of their family tree on an online system. By this I mean that their original copy of their genealogical information is on a site like Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org. I recommend against this.

While I trust Family Search to not go out of business and I know Ancestry performs backups of their data, I still would never put my trust into any one company outside of my control. I very much prefer to be in charge of my own data directly, then share it using any number of online services.

Labelling Photos

How can you label digital photos and documents in a way that the label stays with the photo so you'll always know what the document source is or who is in the photo? Back in physical photo and photo album days, you could write on the back or border of the photo or even on the photo album page. Did you know it's nearly as easy to "flip over" a digital photo and write on the back?

When you look at a digital photo, all you see is the photo open in you viewer program. In reality though, it is a file that contains a stream of characters. Some of these characters contain the contents of the photo and some of them are considered "metadata". Metadata is data about data. It tells the program what is in the file so it knows what to do with it. It's the photo viewer that reads these characters and translates them into this visible photo.

My dad, John Anthony Miller on the right. His aunt, Cecelia Bowen, is in the center.