Our Heritage Vault

Preserving Digitized Files

2011-11-17T09:39:00.001-05:00

If it's worth remembering, it's worth keeping. If it's worth keeping, it's worth digitizing. If it's worth digitizing, smart people will back up their digitized files to the cloud at a place like Our Heritage Vault.

Thank You for Your Service

2011-11-09T23:00:00.001-05:00

World War I Military Service
Recognition Certificate from
the Kennedy Administration.

This Friday is Veterans Day. Do you best to find a vet and thank him or her for serving our country. The world is a whole lot better off because of them. This week's issue of Our Heritage Preservation salutes our veterans and urges family members to gather the memories of their family members who served. Too many veterans, especially World War II veterans, returned home, found peace within their families, and became silent about what they experienced. It was nearly 60 years after the war ended before America dedicated the national World War II Memorial in honor of them. News broadcaster Tom Brokaw dubbed them the Greatest Generation, celebrating their stories, and lifted the participants a shroud of silence.

Vietnam era veterans also returned home in silence as the country looked for a rationale for that war.

Wars may be popular or unpopular, but the warriors always deserve our respect and thanks.

Visit Our Heritage Preservation and get a free subscription to our weekly magazine.

Thanksgiving Menu Theme: Family History

2011-11-03T16:05:00.003-04:00

The Holiday Season is the perfect time to reconnect with family members and learn about your heritage. Getting people to talk about their lives and experiences can be difficult though, so our latest issue of Our Heritage Preservation offer a pre-holiday menu of ideas to get your conversations flowing. It's entitled, On Your Holiday Menu: Family History.

We would be happy to send a free copy of Our Heritage Preservation to your email inbox each week. Simply visit OurHeritagePreservation.com and subscribe today. You'll receive a complimentary copy of SOS: Saving Our (Great American) Stories--A Quick Start Summary.

Have a Memorable Day!

Steve

Is There a Future President in Your Family?

2011-10-21T21:21:00.000-04:00

Unless your Address is:

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Washington, DC

You need

SOS: Saving Our (Great American) Stories

A Quick Start Summary

The President of the United States lives and works at The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC. Official photographers and the news media document his activities, and an army of assistants help the President perform his duties while creating records of his accomplishments. After the President leaves office, the Archivist of the United States takes custody of those records and they become the basis for a Presidential Library.

There are currently 13 Presidential Libraries that serve as repositories for preserving and providing access to the papers, records, and other historical materials of U.S. Presidents. The records of Presidents prior to Herbert Hoover are located at the Library of Congress and other repositories near where they lived. At the dedication of his library in 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt said,

“To bring together the records of the past and to house them in buildings where they will be preserved for the use of men and women in the future, a Nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future."

These materials tell the stories of famous men (and someday soon, women) and their achievements. The libraries serve as museums providing texture to the history of a President during his administration as well as before and after.

Since you and your family don’t have the National Archives saving and preserving your family’s history, you need to do it yourself. SOS: Saving Our (Great American) Stories--A Quick Start Summary will help you identify, protect, and preserve photographs, color slide, videos, important documents, and much, much more. It will provide you with ideas about ways in which your family can document the evidence of your lives and preserve it for the future.

If your daughter, son, granddaughter, or grandson plans to become President of the United States one day, today is the day that you need to start preserving the story of her or his formative years for the Presidential Library in her or his future years.

Sign up now for Our Heritage Preservation, a FREE electronic magazine delivered to your email inbox, that will provide you with easy ways to preserve your stories and fun projects for the whole family. Get your complimentary copy of SOS: Saving Our (Great American) Stories--A Quick Start Summary now. Visit OurHeritagePreservation.com, subscribe, and download your copy now!

Have a Memorable Day!

Steve

What's "More than Genealogy?"

2011-10-18T14:39:00.002-04:00

This week's issue of Our Heritage Preservation is now available at our website.

Genealogy is typically the study of one's ancestry and recording the data gathered on a family tree. Our Heritage Preservation advocates that as you perform your genealogical research, you also gather photos, original documents, and other interesting pieces of your ancestors' history. As you collect those additional pieces of information, digitize them so that they can be secured and shared with others.

Get a free subscription to Our Heritage Preservation and every future issue will come directly to your email inbox plus with your subscription order you can obtain a complimentary copy of SOS: Saving our (Great American) Stories, A Quick Start Summary.

Our Heritage Preservation

2011-10-12T12:29:00.000-04:00

This week's issue of Our Heritage Preservation is now available at our website.

In concert with the office of the U.S. Surgeon General, "Preserving Our Family through Family Health Histories" makes a strong recommendation to gather health data as part of genealogical research. This issue's Action Ideas for Active People provides the first of three steps to help you collect and share your family's health histories.

Our Heritage Preservation Debuts

2011-09-28T17:35:00.000-04:00

Our Heritage Preservation, a new, free magazine, delivered directly to your email inbox debuts early next month in commemoration of National Family Heritage month. Congress first designated October as National Family Heritage Month 10 years ago and during the past decade there was a tremendous increase in interest in genealogy and tracing the roots of one's family.

The new publication offers stories and small projects to assist in creating and preserving family trees while preparing a survival kit for a family's photos, color slides, and important documents. Early subscribers will receive a complimentary, quick start summary of SOS: Saving Our (Great American) Stories.

Visit Our Heritage Preservation to subscribe today!

New Beginnings: Kim, Kris & Irene.

2011-08-22T09:34:00.003-04:00

What a Weekend!

Kim & Kris got hitched and Irene got spawned in the Eastern Caribbean. The Monday morning news editors are jockeying to give both stories the visibility they deserve, and while there's a shortage of data to predict the future of Hurricane Irene and its potential affect on the U.S. mainland, there's plenty of information (and more to come) about the Kim Kardashian/Kris Humphries wedding.

When you're a star on reality TV or a professional basketball player, everything you do--good and bad--is documented on film, videotape, and in print. No so for the rest of us. We have our favorite photographs and some video of our kids and grandchildren growing up, but our entire collection of video doesn't get close to the amount of video taken from multiple angles of the Kardashian-Humphries gala affair.

Imagine, the images from your kids' lifetime don't add up to those of an evening of a lifetime. More important, when there's huge commercial value to your video, there's a plan to take care of those images so that they're protected from loss. With Irene swirling in the Caribbean this week, they'll be plenty of heartbroken people who lose lots, including their family's wedding photographs, as wind and floods invade the security of their homes.

As you make a plan, build a kit, and stay informed in anticipation of a natural disaster, give some thought to how and what photos, video, color slides, and documents you want to protect . . . . unless your last name is Kardashian or Humphries. Then you can let others do it for you. If you're on your own though, check out our Important Things Index or the EvacuPacket, a Do-It-Yourself kit. If you decide to buy one, commemorate the first hurricane of the 2011 season and use coupon code ZCBA3B to save $10.00.

Have a memorable day!

Bye-bye Emily.

2011-08-05T16:14:00.003-04:00

Greetings from South Florida!

Yeah! We dodged Emily!

Boo-o-o. The National Weather Service added a couple of storms to its prediction for this hurricane season.

What have you done to protect the things you want to enjoy and ensure that they're available for your children to enjoy? Digitize now. Take the photos on display in your living room. If you have the negatives or files and you've locked them away in your safe deposit box, good for you! If you’re like me, and you don’t know where they are, it would be a good idea to scan and make digital files of those photos now.

After all, if those photos are on display in your home, they’re the ones that you like the most. Make sure that they’ll be there for your children and grandchildren . . . all your grandchildren because once you replicate a photo electronically, you can make as many duplicates as you want. It’s easy.

Have a memorable day.

WSJ--25 Documents You Need Before You Die

2011-07-07T11:48:00.000-04:00

The Wall Street Journal recommends collecting 25 documents before you die. Comments to the article by Saabira Chaudhuri include more.

Our Heritage Vault thinks there are lots more things to consider and to remember that information is only good if you and designated members of your family have access to it. Compare our lists of things to think about.

Have a Memorable Day!

Steve

Protecting My Smartphone Apps

2011-06-29T16:42:00.001-04:00

Last night, Verizon Wireless invited me to download and upgrade to Android 2.2 Froyo. Having heard good things about the latest version of Android, I was ready . . . but not ready enough. Verizon Wireless encourages the download and offers more information for my Samsung GalaxyS telephone. Unfortunately, the information at http://support.vzw.com/system_update/samsung_fascinate.html is skimpier than the hair on my head.

It's not a disaster but I should have been better prepared for the changes that occurred. I clicked the "Okay" button and the download started. Once installed, I roamed around a bit, but my handset got bogged down in upgrading the apps that I had previously downloaded. All of my apps were listed plus it looks like some additional ones that Verizon included.

The biggest change is that my shortcuts and my arrangement of shortcuts were eliminated. All the things that made my phone my own were gone . . . poof! Had I know that this would happen, I would have included it in my preparedness for a lost smartphone. Knowledge is power and power is very helpful in disaster recovery. Here's how to increase your knowledge and rapidly recover when your smartphone is lost or stops operating correctly. In addition to this upgrade, I had to replace a smartphone when the on/off button did not function correctly and spent a lot of time changing the settings of my new phone. So, now that I'm wiser, let me share some ideas about how to be better prepared for these types of changes. You want images of your telephones apps and their layout to get you back on track as quickly as possible.

Screen Capture
of Samsung
Galaxy S
Grid View

Expectations: Remember that you are preparing reference material in the event of a catastrophe. The images that you obtain in this process may not be presentation quality but they will remind you of the apps that you downloaded and how you used your smartphone. Those images will help you recover more quickly in case of a flood, fire, or other community or personal disaster.

Equipment Required: Flatbed Scanner. (You can also use a digital camera with zoom lens on a tripod.)

Instructions for a Samsung GalaxyS smartphone using the Android operating system:

Preparation:

Go to: Settings/DisplaySettings/Brightness> Adjust to maximum brightness.
Go to: Settings/Display Settings/Screen Timeout> Adjust the setting to 2 minutes.
Go to: Applications.
Adjust the settings to a "Grid" or "Page" view.
Clean the glass on your flatbed scanner.
Set your scanner software to :

Image type: 48-bit color
Resolution: 300 dpi
Document size: Approximately 3" x 4"
Target size: 4" x 6"

Remove protective covering from your smartphone so that the face of the phone lies a close to the flatbed as possible.
Clean the face of your smartphone.

Scanning/Photographing:

First:

Preview scan the first page or grid view
Manually adjust, if necessary, the scanned image window to include the view of the apps plus the grid or page number.
Scan each page or grid view in either .jpg or .pdf format. (I suggest .pdf format so you can add images to a single file.)
Name the file such as "My Smartphone All Apps 110531." I recommend a date at the end of file name so that you can readily identify the most recent iteration.

Second:

Set the Wallpaper of your smartphone to a single, neutral color. (With a Samsung GalaxyS, press and long-hold a clear space on Wallpaper to gain access to Wallpaper selections.)
Preview scan the first page.
Manually adjust, if necessary, the scanned image window to include the view of the apps plus the grid or page number.
Scan each page or grid view in either .jpg or .pdf format. (I suggest .pdf format so you can add images to a single file.)
Name the file such as "My Smartphone Shortcut Views 110531."

Saving and Accessing your Information

Move your two digital files "My Smartphone All Apps 110531" and "My Smartphone Shortcut Views 110531" to a folder in which you can readily find them.
Consider backing up your computer hard-drive user files to a portable hard drive.
Consider backing up your user files to a secure cloud-based online account so that you can access this information from wherever you may travel or if you cannot access your data due to flood, fire, or other natural disasters.

Let me know if this is helpful to you. Email me at ShulmanS@OurHeritageVault.com. Also, let me know if you'd like other helpful ideas to preserve your stuff. I have lots of ideas, especially for family heritage material.

Have a Memorable Day!!

Steve

Is the Spring Spate of Storms a Predictor of a Horrid Hurricane Season?

2011-06-01T12:27:00.003-04:00

The devastation caused by this spring’s tornadoes is historic. We will have the pictures and video of post-storm Tuscaloosa and Joplin embedded in our memories for years to come with words seemingly inadequate to describe what remains of portions of those two cities and the lives forever altered. Other, less remarkable tornadoes also touched down and hailstorms breached the peace of rural America.

Midwest rivers, including the Mississippi and the Missouri, continue to crest at levels not seen in decades and property losses are beyond our ability to comprehend them. Too much water from storms and snow melting plagues even the Dakotas this year!

According to a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) announcement, today (June 1) is the beginning of the Atlantic hurricane season. The agency is prepared to help states in hurricane-prone areas but calls on citizens to prepare the businesses and homes for a busy season too. A consensus forecast indicates that there may be 16 tropical storms, 8 hurricanes, and 4 intense hurricanes between now and November 30^th.

Hurricanes can cause damage in a variety of ways. Hurricane winds, tornados spawned after landfall, floods from rainfall, and surges of coastal waters can buffet any structure near their paths.

All Americans should know that floods are the nation’s number 1 natural disaster. They can happen in any state, and the country’s average annual loss from them during the past 10 years was more than $2.7 billion! FEMA reminds us that floods can ruin property and damage lives even when the federal government does not declare a disaster and urges residents to purchase flood insurance because most homeowner policies do not cover flood damage.

But that’s not the whole story. Insurance can pay for the replacement of a home, furniture, and fixtures, but it cannot replace one-of-a-kind objects or things of sentimental value like photographs, family bibles, special awards, and the like. As part of your preparation for this hurricane season, visit FEMA’s Hurricane Preparedness web pages to get the most up-to-date information for you and your family. As you make your plans for evacuation, remember those special things that mean so much to you. For more ideas on what you might miss, visit our website for a checklist of important things.

Disaster Preparedness: Another Reminder

2011-05-09T14:07:00.002-04:00

Tornadoes and floods devastated hundreds of thousands of acres this spring with more devastation sure to come as the crest of the Mississippi moves down river at record levels to Louisiana during the next couple of weeks.

Damage from this extraordinary weather leaves television news commentators searching for new adjectives to describe the destruction, yet words can never convey the damage, personal, and communal grief like the photos and video images that they broadcast.

Images are very powerful communicators. While its nice that we can use Facebook to post images of found photographs to try to reunite an owner and his/her photos, it's safer and more reliable to care about our own legacy by creating digital files of our favorite photographs, color slides, and important documents, and storing them in a safe place, like the cloud. You can learn more at OurHeritageVault.com.

Kimberly Lankford, Contributing Editor, Kiplinger's Personal Finance, offer some very good advice about disaster preparedness for the upcoming hurricane season and other calamities on the Kiplinger web site.

Japan's Memory Hunters Seek Priceless Memories

2011-04-11T19:25:00.005-04:00

Japan's Memory Hunters--April 11, 2011 4:05 PM
As the humanitarian crisis continues in Japan after last month's massive earthquake, CBS News correspondent Celia Hatton reports on a small group of volunteers in the village of Minami Sanriku in search of irreplaceable treasures.

View the 2 minute news piece by clicking here:

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7362491n&tag=mg;eveningnews

2011 Hurricane and Tropical Storm Forecasts

2011-04-07T11:43:00.003-04:00

During the past week, some of the most well-known tropical storm and hurricane forecasters announced their expectations for the 2011 season that begins on June 1. While their early spring predictions generally lack pinpoint accuracy, they all indicate an active season with 3-5 intense hurricanes. New technologies and forecasting enable forecasters to watch storms develop and predict landfall 3-5 days before a storm comes ashore. Public safety sources encourage people to prepare for shelter-in-place emergencies and for evacuation. If required, you should plan to evacuate 2 days prior to the expected landfall.

2011 Hurricane and Tropical Storm Predictions

Colorado State University

Tropical Storms: 16
Hurricanes: 9
Intense Hurricanes: 5

AccuWeather

Tropical Storms: 15
Hurricanes: 8
Intense Hurricanes: 3

Tropical Storm Risk

Tropical Storms: 14.2
Hurricanes: 7.5
Intense Hurricanes: 3.6

2010 Actual Hurricanes and Tropical Storms

Tropical Storms: 19
Hurricanes: 12
Intense Hurricanes: 5

61 Year Average of Hurricanes and Tropical Storms

Tropical Storms: 10.5
Hurricanes: 6.2
Intense Hurricanes: 2.7

Making the Most of 30 Minutes: A Challenge Inspired by the Japanese Earthquake

2011-03-14T15:20:00.002-04:00

Reports from Japan indicate that the residents of northeastern Japan had no significant warning in advance of the major earthquake that struck their communities on Friday, March 11 and about 30 minutes to prepare for a tsunami that followed. Further away from the epicenter of the earthquake, people had between 60 and 90 seconds to prepare for it, just enough time to turn off natural gas and find a place to hide and survive.

Whether it is seconds before one disaster or minutes between two, figuring out how to survive becomes almost instinctive, putting to good use the planning and training that you practiced. With so little time, there is no time for anything else.

Our Heritage Vault is an advocate for planning and preserving family photographs and important documents. It takes time to do a good job of selecting old photographs, digitally scanning them, creating electronic files of your favorites, and saving those files on the Internet. It is also important to create electronic files of documents ranging from your estate planning to insurance policies to deeds and titles, and much, much more.

Here’s the challenge. Take 30 minutes to identify the things that you would miss if you were among those who lost so much in northeastern Japan. Need help? Visit our website and look at the Important Things Index, a comprehensive list of things that we care about. If you live in an area prone to hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and flooding rivers and streams or if you are otherwise susceptible fires, floods from broken pipes, and careless neighbors, take the challenge.

Find out what you will miss and think about how you can prevent loss. Let us know if we can help or leave a comment about the things you'll miss.

Sun Rays Can Damage Old Photos Just as Much as Hurricanes and Floods.

2011-03-08T18:00:00.005-05:00

Although the start of 2011 hurricane season is still a few months away, it may not be a hurricane or flood that sweep away the photos that trigger your favorite memories but something far less dramatic than fury of a tempestuous storm. There may be little things that can adversely affect your collection of old and vintage photographs with the same catastrophic effect as a major flood.

A color snapshot from 1967

One of those things is sunlight. Did you know that the sun's rays will cause more deterioration to photographs than storm clouds? Older color photographs are especially susceptible to the sun’s rays. Fluorescent lighting is also a problem and as more people use of energy efficient compact fluorescent lamps (CFL), photographic images that are on display may deteriorate more rapidly.

There are companies that can restore, or attempt to restore, images to their original look but it’s very expensive. Capturing a digital scan of an image before significant deterioration or damage makes a lot of sense. The size of the scan and the equivalent dpi (dots per square inch) will enable you to create a print of an image that is compatible with the original. Waiting until after there are faded colors make it much more expensive to achieve comparable results. Water damage and scratch removal will also add to the cost of restoration too.

Consider creating digital scans of your favorite 25 photographs at 600 dpi. If something happens, you can create print replications that will preserve your memories and you'll have the capacity, if you desire, to enlarge the original to a new image.

For more ideas about what you may want accessible in electronic file form, visit Our Heritage Vault. Our Do-It-Yourself (DIY) package, the EvacuPacket provides guidance, templates, and an emergency organizer for your favorite photos and important documents. Save $10 off the retail price of an EvacuPacket by using the code TB2HEG at the checkout counter.

Don't Wait: Another Hurricane Season Starts in Just 3 Months

2011-03-01T16:25:00.004-05:00

Even if not submerged, wet conditions
and oxygen will stimulate mold growth
on any organic material.

Yes, there are lots of ways to spend time rather than digitally scanning and creating electronic files of your favorite photographs. But how long can you tempt fate? How many years have passed since the last major flood or storm struck your neighborhood? Protecting your photo albums and pictures from a rainy day is a smart thing to do. You ensure that the memories those photos evoke can be passed on as “show and tell stories” from you to future generations.

To start, consider creating digital scans of your favorite 25 photographs. Generally, people scan their photos at 300 dpi (dots per square inch) from which they can create printed images. We recommend 600 dpi. It takes a little longer to complete the scan and there is little difference when printing the same size image as the original. The difference appears if you want to print a larger image or to take a detail from a photograph, for example, print a photo image of Grandpa’s head and shoulders from a photo with his siblings. New scanning software provides greater contrast, especially for color-on-color, three-dimensional objects. Old vacation photographs with the family auto in the background would benefit from this new technology.

There will never be a better time to start preserving your favorite photographs. The first step is to select your favorite 25 photographs. We developed a Do-It-Yourself package of information, the EvacuPacket. It provides guidance, templates, and an emergency organizer for keeping favorite photos and important documents with you. Save $10 off the retail price of an EvacuPacket by using the code TB2HEG at the checkout counter.

If you don’t have the equipment or the patience, we may be able to help. Visit our website Our Heritage Vault or call us at (877) 512-4849. For more ideas about what you may want accessible in electronic file form, visit Our Heritage Vault.

Can Your Photographs Become Obsolete?

2011-02-22T11:45:00.001-05:00

Photographs are meant to last a lifetime or longer. Sure, you take new photographs to update a look, a grandchild growing up, or an addition to your home but they are not intended to replace old photographs. New photographs of the same person, place or event help extend and tell a story. An old photograph never becomes obsolete, they become comforting antidotes to the stresses living life.

Family photographs are the first possessions that victims of a tragedy, like a house fire or flood, state that they will miss the most. New technologies enable us to digitally scan and create electronic files from old prints, rejuvenating the image to their original look. Digitized photographs become ageless possessions that can evoke some wonderful conversations among multiple generations. Installing a selection of electronic files on an 8" digital photo frame with high resolution can help people downsize the physical space that photo albums and make viewing favorite photographs much more convenient. Pressing a button is much easier that retrieving, opening, holding, and sharing stories while look at 3" x 5" image pasted in an album or scrapbook.

Scanning old photos prevents loss or damage when the glue gives out or a print escapes from it corner mount and falls to the bottom of its storage box. We offer other ideas about taking care of photographs as well as other important, long-lasting possessions within our "Important Things Index" at OurHeritageVault.com.

Digitized Photos Let You Enjoy the Memories when Moving On

2011-02-09T13:48:00.000-05:00

There is often lots of trauma surrounding the break up of a household. Whether its time for grandma and grandpa to relocate to another home that's more suitable for their advancing years, or a middle-aged couple who have fallen out of love, what's the appropriate disposition for all those photographs that chronicle the happy times of a lifetime or two?

Digitizing old photographs is a great way to reduce storage space and share the happy memories. When families downsize to a new home, there never seems to be enough storage space in the new place. With planning, scanning and creating electronic files of photographs are a great way to sort through and save photos that are important to a family's heritage. They can provide some lighter moments of conversation within the context of the stress that a major move brings on.

Saving digitized files to an SD memory card and backing them up to an online service makes them available for sharing. Installing the SD memory card in digital photo frame, let's grandma and grandpa conveniently display their treasured photos in their new home which may psychologically help them adjust to their new surroundings.

Even divorcing couples may want to look beyond their current adversity and want to share the memories of times less painful, like photos of children growing up, places visited, and pets remembered.

It may be easier to just box up the old photo albums and move them, but it's not as much fun. Our website, Our Heritage Vault, offers some ideas about how to tackle this project as well as other items you may want to digitize and save.

Remember: To start, pick out your favorite photos, not more than a couple dozen, and digitally scan them. You can always add more. In the meantime, take a look at the clothes, the hairdos, the old cars, and start smiling!

Floods in Australia and Brazil Are Reminders for Saving and Protecting Photographs

2011-01-18T10:52:00.000-05:00

The recent floods in Australia and Brazil are reminders that bad things can happen anywhere and at anytime. A little over a year ago, streets and homes flooded during the "dry season" near my home. Yes. Things just happen.

The sentimental things may be the last things you'll remember as you go out the door during an evacuation. Why risk forgetting and losing your favorite photographs and the important documents that you may need after a catastrophe? Include photos and docs in your family's evacuation plan. Better yet, remove the risk by digitizing the items that you may miss and storing them on a portable flash drive or on the cloud at an Internet website.

Now is a great time to organize your old and new photos. Augment your 2010 Holiday photos with scanned copies of Christmases past. It'll be great to see the photos of the kids when they were little again. Okay, so you've added a few pounds since your photo using 35mm film, but can you think of better inspiration to take them off?

For ideas on what you may want to save and protect from an extremely rainy day, visit our index of important things http://www.ourheritagevault.com/important.html.

Our Heritage: A Wholesome Holiday Recipe

2010-12-08T18:43:00.001-05:00

There is nothing quite like the smell of bread baking in the oven. My wife made a challah, a braided egg-enriched bread, the other day. Throughout our house, I felt enveloped by the bouquet of baking dough. It's more than just an aroma wafting through the house. I think it’s also the heat and moisture that made for this very cozy, sensory experience. Nostalgia doesn’t overwhelm me. My heritage does not include homemade bread. Bread came from the grocery store my family owned. I cannot recall my mother ever baking bread, except heat n’ serve Parker House rolls, when I was a kid growing up.

But there’s something about baking bread. The scent of soup steeping on the stove doesn’t do it. Sautéing onions and green peppers in a cast iron pan smells great . . . initially and then becomes a piercing odor as the ingredients caramelize.

During the holidays, there are lots of wonderful aromas from great cooking and baking going on in homes across America. Women and men pull out old family recipes from their box, dust them off, try to remember the previous year’s adaptations, and use them once again. Traditional family recipes make the holidays special. Each year, daring amateur chefs and cooks create new traditions by choosing to introduce new recipes to prepare traditional holiday foods.

Okay, Norman Rockwell’s classic illustrations influence my imagination.

With little exception, most holiday meal preparers adapt recipes to their tastes, some making handwritten notations on the printed page or computer printout. You might say they personalize them for their family and guests, adding another treasure, especially if it tastes exceptionally good, to the family’s trove.

Family, good food, caring friends, and the time to enjoy them are the components of great holiday memories. We document our heritage by keeping those memories through stories and photographs that capture the uniqueness of our experiences.

Sadly, every year families lose significant portions of their heritage because of fires and natural disasters. After every fire and flood, residents who say that they lost everything are most heartbroken by the loss of the pictures. As you look toward the end of the year and starting 2011 with a set of New Year’s resolutions, consider an easy one. Create digital files of the things that are important to you, store them in a safe location outside your home, and begin backing up your computer files on a regular basis.

Need some ideas about how and where to get started? Visit www.OurHeritageVault.com for a list of thing important things to consider, including your favorite bread recipe. And if you don’t have a favorite recipe for bread yet, try this one: http://www.howcast.com/videos/265122-How-To-Make-Challah-Bread

Risk Management for Old Photos & Other Stuff

2010-11-11T12:03:00.000-05:00

I participated in a business expo this past weekend and had a chance to talk with some strangers as well as people that I know about Our Heritage Vault. There was a general feeling that life is so much easier with digital photographs and all the things that you can easily do with them, although several people said they don't do much. (I have one friend who just keeps buying more and more multimedia cards to continue taking photos but does not download them to a computer or photo service--very risky behavior.)

People didn't talk much about old photographs though. They know that they'd hate to lose them. They just don't have the time or money to convert them to electronic files and store them in independent, multiple places like a safe deposit box, on the cloud, as well as on a external hard drive.

We encourage everyone to manage the risk of losing the physical elements of treasured memories. Take some time to just prioritize what you might miss most . . . the wedding photo on the wall, the kids photos on the bookcase, a grandchild's first crayon drawing, or an aunt's recipe for your favorite dessert. One person said that she has so much stuff--boxes of memories. Okay, maybe she has more than most of us, but the barrier remains the same. Where do I start?

I asked her, "What are your favorite 24 photographs?" Photographs tell stories and being able to tell 24 stories from photographs is a good place to start. You can add more related photos to further articulate a particular story and edit (toss out) those photos that really don't enhance a story.

It may be a big job, so think about doing it with someone who may appreciate the stories. If that person doesn't appreciate a specific story, it may help you identify those that are more important or interesting. Family gatherings, like Thanksgiving, may give you a chance to look at a some old photos too.

WARNING: Depending upon the quantity of your old photos, this can be a daunting exercise. Take it slow. Make a plan. Make it manageable. And most important, make it enjoyable by sharing with others.

Dead Sea Scrolls will be Digitally Available

2010-10-22T15:38:00.001-04:00

The Washington Post reports that the Israel Antiquities Authority and Google are digitizing the entire collection of the Dead Sea Scrolls. One of the most fascinating and talked about archeological discoveries of the 20th century, scholars and the public will have online access to the electronic versions of the artifacts which will enable study without the risk of accelerated deterioration by exposure to light and variable air conditions. The report indicated that approximately 30,000 fragments from 900 scrolls will be digitized.

Digitizing Founding Father's Papers

2010-10-22T15:28:00.002-04:00

Americans will have easy access to the nation's Founding Fathers' papers thanks to the collaborative efforts the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), the grantmaking arm of the National Archives, and The University of Virginia (UVA) Press. NHPRC will provide a grant of $2 million to digitize volumes of documents and post them on a special web site. For more information, visit the National Coalition for History.