My Family Trello Boards are Digital Scrapbooks

In my last blog post, I wrote about discovering Trello and creating a Board for the use of our Family History Center staff. I enjoy the product so much and am visualizing more ways to use a Trello board in my family history research.

This week I created 3 new Trello boards as I'm showing on the image above. In that pedigree, I'm the primary person, Mary Rebecca "Becky" Margheim. My father is Ernest Ludwig Margheim and his parents are John and Mollie Koleber Margheim. 

I created this Trello board for the John & Mollie Margheim Family.

Starting at the upper left corner you can see a List for John Ludwig Margheim. Beside it to the right is a List for my grandmother Amalia "Mollie" Koleber Margheim. The third List is for my dad, Ernest Ludwig Margheim, then comes Alfred George Margheim, LaVerna Margola Margheim and Leonard Marvin Margheim. The items that I've included for each person show a snapshot into their lives. I've created a "Card" for each person that contains their birth information, documents, photos, news clippings, greeting cards, etc. I've also added "cards" for Marriage, School, Hobbies, Careers, Death, Funeral, Burial and life events like that. 

The nice thing about using a Trello Board for organizing and displaying these kinds of things about family members is the flexibility and variety of information we can add. The Cards move from List to List simply by dragging them into place. In the family above, LaVerna and Leonard are twins, so I could add birth information and photos for LaVerna and simply copy it to Leonard's List. On John and Mollie's Lists, I could share marriage documents and photos. 

You can see in the above pedigree that George and Katy Koleber were the parents of my dad's mother Mollie. I prepared a Trello Board for them initially to organize and make easily available a very large collection of newspaper clippings that I've gathered from the Barton County Democrat and Western Kansas World, found at Chronicling America, a Library of Congress site. 

Since George and Katy Koleber immigrated to America in 1904, I also included Immigration records on their Board. I added the news clippings in chronological order on each person's List. By reading the family Board, I've gotten a much better picture of their daily lives, the ups and downs, challenges, losses, and trials. I found many news articles online about George Sr. and George Jr. and know how much time they spent together working and visiting, just by reading the short news snippets.

As I researched for news clippings for my grandpa Margheim's family, my heart was drawn closer because of all the trials his family went through. 

This is the Board I made for Grandpa's parents and family, the Jacob and Katy (Winter) Margheim Family. Their first child was daughter Eva, who married Fred Michaelis. I've added the news clipping that tells of their 4 year old son's accidental death. Next to Eva is daughter Lena, who passed away in the Topeka (KS) State Hospital. Her death certificate is a "Card" on the List. Jacob and Katy's oldest son Fred is shown in the 4th List from the left. His death by drowning in a local lake is recalled in a news clipping that is also included in his personal List. And the stories continue as we review the lives of the members of Jacob and Katy's family. 

Presenting information in this format has been enlightening for me, not to mention how much fun I've had creating the Boards. I have a lot of news clippings from the early 1900s that mention my mother's parents and grandparents, so I'm planning to create Flanders and Becker Boards yet. 

I can add photos, documents, and news clippings to the Memories gallery on my Family Tree at FamilySearch.org, and have done so.

But the flexibility of adding so much more information, comments, links, and labels to the Cards on a Family Trello board make it very appealing to me for organizing and sharing my family's history. 

If I have many photos for an individual or family, I've uploaded them to albums on Flickr and put a link to that album on the final Card for the individual on their List. 

I recently created a Power Point presentation for any of my cousins who would like to see the Trello Boards for our common ancestors. You can find it here.

If you would like to visit my Family Boards for ideas of how you can make a digital scrapbook for your family, or if you're my cousin and want to learn more about our family members, or download any of the resources I have on my Trello Boards, just open your FREE account at Trello.com and email me your Trello account name so I can give you access to my Boards.
My email is maryrthompson218@gmail.com.
I think you'll have fun with it. Let me know!