Starting a Blog for Your Baby

As a new parent, it’s not always easy to find time to record a baby’s early life in their baby book.  Create a blog for your baby to help you to complete the missing information in their baby book later and give them an interactive window into their early childhood as an adult.

Choose a blogging website and sign up for a free membership.  There are many blogs to choose from.  Find a blog that is easy to use and one with enough features to suite your tastes.  Consider making the blog private and only sharing it with your spouse.  Keep the whole project a secret from your child until they are much older.  It will be a sweet and unexpected surprise for your son or daughter to receive access to so much information about their childhood.  Verify that you are able to download backups of the blog to your computer and do so frequently.

Take lots of digital photographs of your baby.  A mobile phone with a built-in camera is extremely handy for this.  Remember that pictures taken with a camera phone will typically be low resolution and perfect for displaying on the blog, but will not make good printed photographs.  If you wish to print many of the pictures that you take of your baby, buy a decent digital camera and keep it close by at all times.  If you take mostly high resolution photos of your baby, use a photo editing program to make lower resolution copies to post to the blog because they will take up far less space and load faster in your web browser.

Post interesting and detailed blog entries every day.  Write as though you are speaking to your child directly.  Don’t write, “Ate applesauce for the first time today.”  Make the post interesting and discuss things that were happening, not just with your child, but also with family members and friends whom they will be able to relate to later in life.  Don’t share any negative or personal feelings about anyone and don’t talk about your problems or worries.  Keep the experience positive and upbeat.  You can also add brief clips of current events, but remember not to just link to other web sites.  Most websites change constantly, so you’ll want to make snapshots of pages or find files that you can save on the blog or link to.  PDF files are a great format to use for capturing pictures and text in a single document because they display the same way, no matter which browser you use to view the file.

Upload short, compressed video files or sound clips to the blog.  This will require additional equipment, like a digital video camera and the appropriate editing software, but the results are well-worth the investment.  Your child will one day have the ability to watch their first steps or hear their first words by simply logging into the blog, which will be far more interactive than their baby book could ever be.

How to Search for Your Ancestors

Discover the rich history of your family through patience and diligent research and illuminate your past!  You may be a descendant of royalty or perhaps a famous historical character and not even know it.

The quest to enrich your knowledge of family history begins at home with your closest living relatives.  Parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents, and even great-grandparents are the most reliable resources available to you to acquire family stories and secrets that nobody else could possibly know.  Don’t let the precious time you have with them slip away.  Take advantage of each opportunity to reminisce about the past and learn more and more about your family.  Record everything in the form of notes, audio recordings, and video.  One day, you’ll be glad you did.

Look through the family Bible if your family has one.  It used to be tradition in many families to record births, deaths, and other significant events in the family Bible.  To dig even further into the past, join one of the many online resources for genealogy research.  Why do all the footwork when someone out there may have already filled in many portions of your pedigree?  You can also use the library as a research tool by looking through old newspaper clippings and history books.

If you can determine the location where your ancestors lived the majority of their lives and the church they attended, you may be able to locate their name in the church’s records.  If you’re lucky, you may also discover their grave marker.  If you do, be sure to clear away any debris from the marker, take a digital picture, and include it into your online family tree.  Leave some flowers as a show of respect.  There are also free websites dedicated to listing grave marker information and pictures to which you can contribute.

Travel to the countries, the cities, the small towns, or the villages where your ancestors lived.  Sometimes, the locals have stories to tell or your family may have left a unique impression.  Above all, be sure to record anything of interest.  Sometimes pieces of the puzzle don’t make sense until they are matched with others.  Be sure your story is told as well.  Keep a journal or even a blog so that in the future, your descendants can learn more about your life experiences.