How to Find Your Family History on YouTube

[Music] hello my genealogy friends welcome to elevens is with lisa uh this is our place where we get together each week thursday morning live and we grab our favorite cup of tea or coffee and no i don't have the official mug today i didn't do the dishes i know but my my friend uh kim gave me this so it's coffee is a hug and a mug um and and today is a hug about genealogy because we're going to talk about our favorite topic which we always do and i'm excited because you know we spend so much time together on youtube and there is so much family history at youtube and i can't wait to share it with you so we're gonna jump right into it and uh let me jump over here let's hope let's hope everything works there it is all right hey we're going to talk about how to find your family history at youtube and i know it sounds a little far-fetched but this idea actually came to me because i was teaching a course over at valedictory university a couple of months ago and every once in a while i teach on either google search or google earth i got to move my mug so i don't just splash it all over my desk and um so this one was about google and of course it's based on my book the genealogies google toolbox and in that book there is a whole chapter on using youtube uh how to create a channel and how to find videos about your family history and just all kinds of things that you can do well uh one of my students wrote in the comment section and i wanted to share this with you because it's pretty cool she said um okay her name was deborah she said i never knew uh she never knew her father or her grandparents and she told me uh quote i only found out about them through genealogy and dna testing three years ago you can imagine how exciting that was so one of the things i was telling students in the class to do was to make a list of all the locations where their family was from and so she made a list of where her grandfather grew up whatever she knew about him and one of the places was minot maine and i i think it's pronounced minot i know it is in north dakota we have friends and might not but it's m-i-n-o-t maine and it was george pulcifer okay so she goes to youtube and she did what i suggested was to search for minot main film footage just as a kind of an easy quick start to see what was out there and she runs the search look at these now she's got a couple of different historical videos that have come up instantaneously but here is this search result and of course she was very skeptical when i was talking about you're going to find your family history on youtube well she found it in this video the u.s mail goes by dog sled this is by critical past and she said i knew george and his brother alden were the first international dog sled drivers for the mail in the late 1920s and have a newspaper article that i found two years ago about their adventures and this is them can you believe this my friends this is so cool this is them in i think it's 1936 so if you come down to the video description you can see if you click show more that is 1935 february 4th 1945 she said this was so exciting to actually see grandfather and great uncle in action grandfather's face was not visible but great uncle alden was that i recognized from the photographs that i possess i was ecstatic she said some some great family information to fill in the spaces that i have do you have some spaces to fill in i want to help you do that okay and so let's dig in and and talk about step by step how you can do this and uh what what you should be looking for and first and foremost let me just explain why it's so likely that you have family history information on youtube the first thing is is that these days next to google.com youtube is the number two search engine in the universe so that means there's a ton of traffic going on and traffic means lots and lots of videos cisco reported back in 2014 that 64 of all internet traffic was video well what they're predicting for 2021 is 85 and that's incredible so in order you know when when um people figure out that that's what people are interested in you can imagine there's a lot of video being created a lot of documentaries a lot of these old newsreel companies are going hey let's digitize our stuff and get it up on youtube we'll get some traffic get some advertising right so there's incentive financially for people and companies to put their video up on youtube so stuff is coming out of the archives it's coming out of people's attics it's getting digitized and it's getting put on youtube more than one billion unique users visit youtube each month and they watch and they upload videos that's what's so important about one billion is the activity and the idea that every person has the potential of maybe having somebody else's family history in their old film footage and a lot of us were taping tv shows on vhs right so i know i've been digitizing some of that and looking back through it and going oh my gosh i have these old local news features and tv shows and all kinds of stuff you never know where somebody might show up and even if your ancestors aren't showing up you know their beautiful face on the screen there's so much that you can learn about where they lived what they lived through all that kind of stuff because that also gets captured on video and the truth is that digitizing video is easier and more affordable than it's ever been we've talked about this uh here at the genealogy gems channel we talked about um i used larson digital out in utah to do a bunch of digitization of my stuff i talked on my genealogy gems podcast to dr haas who had this treasure trove of old home movies going back to the 1920s and i hope some of you got a chance to listen to that episode he was so inspiring he he realized he had hundreds of families family in his videos and so he worked diligently and made it kind of a life's work to get it all digitized get it up online where people could find it so that just all adds up to the fact that family history and video together is awesome and it's on youtube and i want to help you find it here so the first thing you need to do is think about who you would like to find so take a look at your family tree and select a person now if you pick somebody who's more recent you're more likely to actually see that person in film but if you want to learn about an ancestor from you know a century or two ago there's still all kinds of stuff that you can find so don't let that stop you on who you want to pick or which family you want to learn more about in fact for those of you participating here at the live audience which we do every morning on thursdays at 11 a.m central go in the chat and if you've got somebody in mind share with people who that person is and why you can't wait to find something about them okay maybe by the end somebody will pipe up and say well they were on a different web browser and in youtube and they found it while we were talking all right so we're going to make a list for this person that we've selected our ancestors so um take a look at your genealogy database and you've got all your data in there your family trees in there make a list of the names of people associated with this person um i i let's target a person okay you mean you could target a family but i think that we'll we'll kind of work on one individual person and so i'm gonna write down their name and i'm going to put a couple of key people maybe their spouse their parents their kids just so we kind of have an idea of who we're looking for as you saw deborah had not only her grandfather but i guess it's her great uncle her grandfather's brother was in the video as well so uh having his name might help in further searching and then we're going to make a add to that list the places where these this person lived so um and i know for a couple of my ancestors i really had to go back and refresh my memory of all the different places that they had lived and chances are you could even just print out a quick report from your genealogy database if you have one and maybe things like where they went to school where they worked because certainly their occupation is a wonderful item to target when it comes to looking for old film uh events and it could be events that they participate in themselves it could be events you know world events things that would have really distinctly affected their lives uh be kind of interesting to learn more about that and bring some more uh color to the story of what their life was like and things like hobbies groups clubs anything that they were involved in make a list who were their friends who were their associates who did they know these are also people that if you search that person you may find that even if your ancestors not named there they are on the screen you know doing something with that person or maybe by searching that person you're going to learn a whole lot more about the town where your ancestor lived and get to see it maybe up close so i i love examples because there's nothing more inspiring than um having a chance to really see what somebody was able to do successfully so i want to share lots of these case studies with you today carolyn wrote me and she has my book and she said today i finally decided to try youtube and she says which i'd never gone to before now you guys your old pros but a lot of people particularly um you know folks who are older too you know i know before i got really involved in doing all this i wasn't looking at youtube a whole lot uh but a lot of us are spending a lot more time on it lately and this was her first foray and into looking at youtube so she said okay the first thing i did was i put in my great uncle will ivy baldwin was his name so let's go to youtube and we're going to type in our search will ivy baldwin and um click the search button now there's a good chance we'll get all kinds of stuff that is not about her ancestor we may not even get her specific ancestor but let's try we can see lots of uh different videos that mention ivy baldwin there's an ivy baldwin dance studio it looks like but this first video 82 year old ivy baldwin crosses the el dorado canyon on a high wire in 1948 no harness no net holy smokes this is her ancestor mr ivy baldwin oh my gosh so even if they're not referring to him as will we found him through the ivy baldwin part of our search and don't you just hope that you'll be doing things like this when you're 82 i mean this is this is a pretty cool dude he makes it all the way across this canyon so searching by name could bring something up whether it's an old newsreel uh maybe it's a local news station that ran a piece maybe it's just somebody who lived in that area who caught this high wire act and took an old home movie this movie doesn't even have any sound with it i don't think but it really gives you a sense of what you can find and notice when you're looking at the results you know take a look and you can kind of spot what looks like older film footage and what looks like newer film footage that can kind of help you quickly discern and there's additional ones here so if you find one now this one here this is the santa barbara historical museum and if you click show more have you ever noticed this description down below the video can have a lot of information in it and it's it's easy to skip it's easy to miss now i'm showing this on desktop but look for that show more in fact practice doing that here at our youtube channel and take a look at there's a lot of information in the video description so if you find a video that has something to do with your family you're gonna want to do that notice as i'm hovering over this this youtube is now picking up closed captioning this is huge notice the time stamp this is also a new feature in the last 12 months so what we're doing now as youtube creators is in the video description we are starting to enter time stamps and if you go down in the video description for more recent videos you'll be noticing these and you might also notice as you hover your mouse over the timeline here this where you kind of scrub along and you can look at what's on the video this one doesn't have a timestamp but i know many of my videos i've been adding timestamps so if you want to jump right to the section of a video you can do that by clicking the timestamp in the description notice the closed caption so this has closed not all videos do but this one has closed caption available more recently uploaded ones tend to you can turn that on which can make it easier for you to watch but here's the big game changer with this having closed caption now available through youtube means that youtube can now actually search this text in the past we've been so stuck we are only able to have youtube search the video title and the description to try to find relevant videos for family history and of course it could be that they're talking about it but they're not a lot of people you'll notice don't put very much information unfortunately here's another one holy smokes they don't put very much information in their description but youtube is now picking up the closed captions so this is amazing you're going to be finding more videos than you did a year ago even six months ago so if you've tried this before you're going to have a lot more success look at this one so this guy they picked up the closed captioning on this it talk he's talking about the fact that he's from this area in colorado he's showing the old film footage of ivy baldwin there look at the there he is same photograph that uh our viewer had so there are a couple of different ones here here's another one novel birthday celebration high wire walking and there he is cutting his birthday cake these videos now i don't know this one says it's been up since 2015. when she first sent me this email i checked i didn't see this particular video and i think what's happening is that closed captioning is allowing us to to find and surface videos that may have always been there but with the humongous volume of videos we missed it now we're gonna show you some of the things that you can do with these videos so that you can make the most of them here's ivy baldwin so let's recap before i show you my my seven things you should be doing with these videos first thing we did was we searched for his name will ivy baldwin and we're going to hover over the results so remember we took our mouse and i'm doing all this on desktop it looks a little different on mobile but as we go through the search results hover your mouse and you may notice that it's going to be telling you oh we spotted that what you searched for in the description we spotted it in the closed captions just it's amazing it's it's become so much more powerful and i think you know machine learning and ai is really making a difference in the algorithm in what we're finding these days we've talked about that here on this show as well and then take a moment and consider adding some additional relevant keywords so if i didn't see anything initially about will ivy baldwin um i could add tightrope if my viewer knew that he was a tightrope tight rope oh that's say that six times fast a tight rope walker then she could add that as a word to see if maybe that would surface additional videos and then something else that you can do is you can use search operators just like i talk about in my book about we can do that at google.com and there's a lot of different search operators you can use but one of the most popular is quotation marks you can use that at youtube as well so by putting quotation marks to capture his name we're then explaining to youtube i don't want just random occurrences of the words will ivy and baldwin i want that as a phrase and i want it in that order i want belt you know baldwin spelled the way i'm i'm spelling it so it really zeros in and filters down to exact matches for whatever you put in your quotation marks and then again you could add extra words like type rope you could even try different variations okay so notice that some of those videos didn't mention will so if i put quotation marks around will ivy baldwin i might miss those so we want to try different variations on our search maybe just make the surname mandatory with the quotation marks and then we could also try tightrope and put quotes around that that should really jump those videos right to the top so that's a quick recap on that here's another quick idea how about go to youtube.com and just search for the phrase home movie it will really inspire you to realize how much is out there now there is a movie called home so that kind of gets in the way but if i put quotation marks around home movie i could even add a surname chances are if somebody with that surname posts an old home movie they they're probably gonna say this is my home movie right from 1971. so that phrase could really help you if i'm looking for briquette home movies how fun to see yes there are people the burkett family from 1937 in california where my briquettes are from um old bay bridge yep mine were from the san francisco san joaquin area of california and again clicking that show more in that video description don't miss that because you want to see what else that uh person who uploaded this video has to offer you so very cool there's so many and you'll be surprised how far back old home movies can go people have been taking old home movies since practically the time that cameras got invented a lot of us don't see them in our families until maybe the 50s or the 60s but clearly they were done much much earlier than that so that's just one more really fun strategy and there are several here so i'm noticing you know this same person has many different briquette home movies i'm going to take a look at that how fun i hope you guys are getting your old home movies digitized and uploaded because uh what what a treasure that is for your own family but it's also a wonderful thing to be sharing here on youtube so i could click his name as the youtube creator this is his channel they call him creators on youtube and see what other kinds of stuff he's got really quickly look at his playlist to see if there's history type stuff okay well there's a lot of stuff he's doing these days but i could do a quick search on his channel of home movie and really fast i've got at the top the home movies that he took he's got at least three old home movies available so that's just an example one of the things you should do once you find an old home movie or any kind of video on youtube and remember it's not just old home movies could be documentaries it could be newsreels it could be anything that kind of sheds more light on the life and times of your ancestor so what to do when you find a video i think i've got seven suggestions here for you first thing you could do is you could add the video to your watch later now watch later is a playlist those of you who are participating in live chat you're able to do that because you logged in with your free google account to youtube right and i hope that those of you who are watching this video later after the live show consider joining us live and uh that's probably one of the top questions i get is well then how do i participate in chat make sure you're logged in to youtube with your google account and so once you're logged in you have in a sense your own channel whether you ever upload anything or not right that's your account what comes automatically by default with that is a playlist and the playlist is a way for you to collect videos that you find that you want to keep and they call it watch later so under every video you will see this plus sign when you click the plus sign let's do that here click it and you'll see the pop-up so if you don't have any other playlist you'll just have watch later click it notice it's locked it's got a little lock so that means it's private other people don't see what's on your watch later playlist but now when you come back to youtube you're going to be able to really quickly find this video again and not have to just search for it but where do you find watch later let me show you how there's a couple different ways one you can come up here to the upper right hand corner click your little uh avatar i guess you call it and go to your channel and you'll see in the left-hand side under the library there is a watch later playlist so that's one way to do it it's also really simple um notice here we go we click it and here are different videos i've tagged and added to my playlist to be able to watch later okay you can also notice those three horizontal lines of the little icon in the upper left hand corner if you click that that sidebar will just slide out i think that's actually the easier way to get to your library into your watch later so we click watch later now we've got all the videos that we've been adding so as you find videos it's really quick and easy to add them to the watch later playlist i would encourage you i i have faith in you you are going to find a lot of different videos that are really going to be interesting and a great addition to your family history so you're going to need some playlists of your own and you can create those in the same spot so if you click that plus sign notice that below at the bottom of the little pop-up window it says create new playlist and it's super easy just click that put in the name you could say oh this is my baldwin playlist and you can decide whether it's private or public so if you make it public then other people might be able to find it and find that you're researching this family that could be a great little connector you can make it unlisted and you might do that if you just want to be able to share the link to that playlist with people in your family but you still kind of want it private so you can have a lot of playlists feel free go in there and make playlists to kind of segment out the different areas of research that you're doing and uh you can add videos there here's enough here at this channel i have a second youtube channel that has two subscribers i don't know me and my husband i don't know and if i click playlist you can see my baldwin ancestors playlist and there's my video so that's a wonderful way to kind of bookmark them hang on to them okay and share them out to social media to your if you have a website you can do that too right next to the um plus sign is share if you click share then you've got options to put it out to social media which of course would be a great engagement for your family to see what you're finding and videos are the number one kind of content that intrigues people so do it you can copy the link to add it in the email or you know put it somewhere else if you click embed if you happen to have a website or a blog or something like that all you have to do is click to copy all that code and now you can embed this you can put it on a web page on your website so i hope you consider blogging about your family history it's a great way to connect with other people researching the same family so here's my video now i can even set it i can say well i only want it to start at the 29 second mark because that's really where he comes on screen notice that now it says start at 46 seconds and now when i copy the code i can put that on my website and when anybody clicks to play it it will automatically start playing exactly at the spot during the video that i want them to see so here in my blog post i'm just going to paste it's just kind of html code you don't have to know what code you know means or what it says and i look at the visual version of my blog post and there's the video so it's truly just copy the code paste it on your blog and now you're sharing your family history videos that you're finding and you're enriching other people's lives and your family um number four comment so another a great way to connect with other people who might be researching the same kind of thing as you is to leave a comment i always encourage you guys to leave comments here at our channel about what we're doing here at genealogy gems because it's a one it lets youtube know this is popular right and it's going to show it to other people it's also a great way to kind of put out there that hey i'm interested in this family you know get in touch with me or i have a blog post about this person that you're watching in the video so it's a great way to collaborate number five is to subscribe to get new uploads i i know we keep hammering you about subscribe to the channel well it's one the perfect way to kind of place channels that you'd like in your favorites list remember when we clicked that three uh horizontal lines icon and we saw your playlist well you've also got your subscriptions those are your channels that you follow i hope you're following mine uh click the the red subscribe button but i would say if this channel has uploaded videos that have to do with your family history and you think there's a chance you know they seem to be interested in this topic subscribing would alert you if they put more on their channel so we're going to click subscribe which puts it in your in your favorites right in your subscriptions and then you've got to click the bell icon this is what's going to notify you hey this channel just uploaded a new video so it's a great way to get a quick notification and you can control those on your phone if you want them off or on um but it will give you a little alert when you come back to youtube hey that channel that you were following not only are you following it but they've got some new stuff so i hope you'll do that with our channel too right that'd be awesome uh number six search the channel creator for more videos so don't just wait for what they might upload let's go check and see if they've already done more i mean the chances that if they've put one they may have others right so don't stop with a single wonderful find i'm going to come down here below every video you'll see the name of the channel creator in fact here if you're watching here on youtube look below my video you'll see lisa louise cook's genealogy gems you can click the channel creator no matter what page you're on and it will take you to their entire channel so let's do that here on will ivy baldwin's video we're going to click british movie tone and you can see wow this is they've uploaded all their newsreels here's the search feature just for this channel so don't use the one at the top of the screen i'm going to just do a quick search on baldwin here on their channel do they have any other videos that mention ivy baldwin now three of them popped up now what's interesting is i i put quotation marks around it just to see if it's an exact phrase and there's only one so chances are the other two that came up without the quotation marks might mention ivy or baldwin that's possible it's also possible occasionally you'll get a result because in the suggested videos for that video that it gave you is the result it's suggesting the one about will ivy baldwin so it's not always perfect in terms of finding additional videos but it's worth a you saw how quick it was it's worth doing a quick search to make hay of the video that she already found and the seventh thing you need to be doing of course let's say it again is go back to that video description it's so easy to miss because youtube only shows one or two lines of text from the description and then it says show more and people just tend to kind of miss that they don't realize it's clickable it doesn't really look like a link but it is clickable so if you click show more you're going to learn more about this video hopefully if the person put more information some people don't bother but they should but what we're going to learn here is this was happening at the boulder creek canyon it was his 82nd birthday we got the date that the video occurred that it was filmed so we could start searching for baldwin in an association with boulder creek canyon you know maybe uh and it also has here the license how could you be allowed to use this video in other ways besides just putting it on your blog post or sharing it out on social media there might be copyright issues so it's going to tell you how to get in touch with them so that you can find out more about how to use it maybe in a presentation at your family reunion or something like that so here notice that on my channel here's my uh one my video about interviewing i try to put look click show note and show more click show more there's a lot of stuff there i do this and you'll notice more and more that i'm putting this time stamps so that you can jump around within the video to quickly refresh yourself on any part of the topics and i'll have the description of each topic and there's always a link that takes you over to the show notes people always ask me how do we get to the show notes and during live chat i post that link uh in the show in the chat which i did today but there's always a link in the video description okay and that's always below the video so and if you want to become a premium member there's a link there um if you want to get the the official elevenses mug all that stuff is down in the show notes so um and speaking of the mug there it is and if you click show less it'll close it back up so you can kind of continue down and and read the comments i should have added that there's your bonus number eight go down and read the comments you might find that somebody on that video that you found has already commented and they're explaining how they are connected with that family just one more thread to start pulling right to to find connections so let's head back to our list and see what else we can find because remember we have names and locations and events and workplaces hobbies locations i think this is probably one of the next best things you could be searching on because so often people don't know who the individual people are in the video but it's a very deliberate you know specific place and that place may be one that your ancestors came from so make that quick list of the cities the counties the regions the states the countries the names of homes or properties or anything that you can think of that is location based so for example i was looking through my records for my husband's family the mons family and they were from margate kent in england and back early 19th century and so i have some church records from when john william muns was born and i thought i had this old postcard but it'd be really interesting i'd like to know more about the church maybe i haven't i actually got a chance a couple years ago to go back and visit but if i didn't it'd be really cool to be able to go on youtube and say could i take a tour and find that church well i did so if you do a search on saint john baptist church this video is oh this guy is so knowledgeable about this church which has been around for a couple hundred years he talks about it he takes you on a tour of it right from your own home so that's what i mean by sometimes it doesn't have your ancestor in it but it's really going to shed a lot of light and bring to life places that are significant to your family history let's think for example how many of us have had ancestors who came through ellis island well what was that like you know if you're talking to your kids or your grandkids or your nieces and your nephews and your you kind of want to explain well it's one thing to talk about it or read a book but it'd be really cool to show a video and there are videos of the passengers coming off those ships at the turn of the century so do a quick search arriving ellis island and you find all kinds of videos and there's some really interesting instructional kind of documentaries there too it's nice it's a fun quick way to kind of get up to speed on the history uh within your family uh you know i do the genealogy gems podcast i don't talk about that much here on the show and i've been doing it since 2007. and if you love podcasts do go into the app store you'll find that we have genealogy gems podcast app and you can get it through alexa and all the different podcasting apps well several years ago a gal named lisa shared how listening to the podcast the genealogy gems podcast led to discovery of an online video because i've been talking about this since before i think google even owned youtube i mean it was clear even back then that every once in a while i'd come across something on video and i think wow you know that's amazing i wonder where that's going to go and it's just exploded well her family was from oxford north carolina okay and so she thought well maybe i'll go and just take a look and see if i can do a quick search uh so she wrote about this on her blog post i i checked i don't think her blog is up any longer but she had this photograph and i think this is her uncle or her great uncle and you notice he's got a crutch under his arm he's kind of tall and thin so she goes to youtube and she does a search for oxford north carolina she's watching this when the people of oxford and how fun somebody's gone up and down main street and filmed all these people and there's a gentleman here's a guy who's that did you notice the crutch under his arm i i think that's the same guy and she said it's amazing i'm almost convinced in fact she put it on her blog post she said you guys have to help me am i just too enthusiastic or is this really the same guy i think it is and um so amazing now what the reason that video was out there was that uh this person who uploaded it i think he was related to somebody who used to own the movie theater in oxford north carolina and so i encouraged her go and check his channel because if he's got that he might have something else and it turned out that this relative of his would go out like on a wednesday afternoon and film people in town and then he'd say come to the movies you might see yourself in the pre-show up on the screen and people would flock to the movies because there was a chance they get to see themselves on film there are several of these i think she found at least five different films of the people of oxford now these aren't famous people the guy who took the film isn't famous he's long gone but the films remain and he got some beautiful there he is in the movie theater people flocking to the movies to see themselves on film so how fun to sit down and just one watch it to get a sense of that place at that time but then to really look closely at the faces you never know who you might see you can also search for occupations and i like to do this in conjunction with places as well so sonny morton who has written quite often here at the genealogy gyms uh show up my blog in the past uh she was talking about a relative of her husband's and so he worked at the fire department in oliphant pennsylvania so i said oh go do a search well she did and there he is this is her husband's i believe it's his great grandfather and i guess the deal was they had this really cool dog that would help save people in fact here's his son on on the engine that's not amazing so some newsreel company came and heard about this really kind of cool dog and filmed it and they've captured uh the ancestors of her husband in this film and here he is giving the dolly they saved back to the little girl with the help of the wonderful dog and there he is again sitting over here on the left she said when they showed this film to her husband's father that he just was in tears that he remembered his grandfather and that it was just uh they had very very few pictures of him so what a treasure to have something like that and they in fact she said they may have had like one photo of him and they end up taking a quick screenshot just saying now we've got two all right and so adding places not necessarily searching for names but when you know your ancestor was part of a place or part of an event maybe start with that first and see if you can spot them that's what uh lori did she wrote me i get i love when you guys write me emails and tell me what you're doing with what you're you're picking up here on the show or in the book or wherever you hear about what i'm yapping about i just love hearing your success stories because i love sharing them i think we all need that kind of inspiration to realize it's never say never right everything is possible so lori wrote and she said okay so i'm reading the book and i'm thinking yeah okay i'll go search and she had very little low expectations but she said she was looking at this shelf in her house and she sees the trophy from the parade the rose parade of 1946. now her mom had told her that she had been on a float when she was a little girl and that her mom her so this was lori's grandmother was kind of the princess or the queen on the float so she's on the float waving and it was some kind of a calistoga wagon it was like v for victory because it was right after the war had completed and what they remembered about it was there were live horses pulling this float so many years ago you can see how old this video is um she was telling me about this so i went to youtube and looked and if you do a search on 1946 rose parade she said oh my gosh this video came right up there's the live horses there's the wagon and there is her mom and her grandmother on the back of the wagon pretty amazing so i said oh my gosh be sure and click the channel creator the guy who who put this up there because he may have other videos now she wrote back and she said well he didn't i said comment or send him an email if you can figure out who he is and sure enough she got in touch with him and he had other film footage she had not uploaded yet one of them was a video of them being presented with that loving cup that they ended up getting and it was sitting on her her shelf absolutely amazing and i think if you guys recall uh in epis i don't remember the episode number but it was on the internet archive it's over at genealogygems.com elevenses i shared this example because uh several years after she shared this story with me um i'm doing the internet archive episode and i thought wouldn't it be interesting to see because i know they have old film there as well take what i found here at youtube how do we make more out of it go take that information and let's go see are there any others this could not have been the only person at this parade who was taking home movies and if you'll recall in that episode we found another actually clearer video from the same event showing her mother and her grandmother so last night as i'm putting you know finishing touches on this presentation for you guys i did a quick search look how many videos are now up on youtube it just keeps growing and that goes back to what we started out with was the volume of traffic and people and the um ability to digitize our home movies and how affordable it is now so she has i think what here five different videos with different angles it's just amazing and in my family uh the briquettes lived through the san francisco earthquake so that is certainly an event that i'm going to go take a quick look and just learn about san francisco history do some searches on the earthquake itself i found this old footage you may have seen this before it's um called a trip down market street was the original name for it somebody got on the back of a streetcar with a their own you know movie camera and took this silent film but it's just this on the ground real look of what was it like living there and this is just two weeks before the earthquake and the reason why this film survived was they ended up putting it on a train to send it back east for production and then a week or two later the earthquake hits they would have lost it completely had they not sent it back east to the producers and finally i just want to encourage you think about the possibility of posting your own family history on youtube now you can do this in a couple different ways if you have old home movies you could post those and upload those it's really simple to do i go step by step through it in the book but you could also create your own family history videos and we've talked about that here at elevens is with lisa too the idea of um how easy it is how you don't have to have video to create video if you just have still images photographs like these i have of my grandmother this little video you're looking at i did ages ago this was one the first ones i ever uploaded to my channel i had my channel just about right after youtube got created and um i put it up there and what i did was i took my grandmother's old home diaries and her diaries that she had written back in the 30s when she was going through nursing school and so i read it and i recorded myself reading it and then i just put it into a video software and added the photographs you would not believe how complicated that was 14 years ago it was really complicated these days super super easy if you want to learn more about that i know many of you are premium members go check out your premium membership because over at my website you will find a three-part video series called video magic this was one that i debuted at roots tech a couple years ago and it will really help you craft the story get it the right length get the cheapest way to produce it storyboard it out so it kind of makes sense it's so easy to do and um and yet with just a little bit of guidance and so that's what i'm trying to give you in this so you really can feel successful at the end i have something to show my family and i've really captured that story that up until now has just been in the document sitting in your binders and in your file cabinets and here on elevens is with lisa episode 16 we talked about how to use adobe spark which is a free app that you can do on your phone your tablet i think it's only on apple but there are other video apps that just happens to be my favorite i use it on my iphone that video has been archived now as part of premium membership so if you're a member i hope that you are that would be awesome what you get are stuff like that the video classes plus the downloadable cheat sheets for every single episode that we have here and um there you go how to find your family history on youtube are you convinced yet i hope you're convinced uh if you want to learn more certainly there's my book that will tell you a whole lot more about that i'm going to bounce over here because i know you guys are we just have such a wonderful active audience here in the live chat and bill has popped in okay so i think somebody had a question about which company i had used to do my digi my digitizing a video larson video conversion um that was how i converted them to digital and they did tons of them the thing was i had video in so many different formats you know like 16 millimeter and vhs and high eight and oh my gosh i just threw it all in a box and they took care of it they did a beautiful job it's larson l-a-r-s-e-n and they're in utah uh oh and i just want to say bill says there's lots of new viewers oh my gosh welcome you guys i'm so thrilled that you came and you joined us and i hope all of you uh long time family members here at genealogy gems have been welcoming everybody because we sure love it i hope that you'll share this show with your friends do you have people who are kind of like wondering about doing genealogy or are feeling a little discouraged or just need a little booster shot with you know let's do something new uh i think this is a really fun activity in terms of family history and it's one that you can do with your other family members with your kids and your grandkids if you find stuff it's going to knock their socks off in a way that sorry that census is not if you had a census record to your family members you get the eye roll right but if you show them i found this video and there's your grandpa walking down the street or whatever or here's the town or here's the church where they they lived i mean that's that's pretty cool stuff um let's see here i want to see really quick anne says hi to bill hi bill oh i'm so glad you guys have enjoyed this you know uh we're coming up towards the end of our hour and i know and let me tell you a live broadcast on youtube for an hour is like unheard of and i keep getting encouraged to cut it short make them short you know because that's what youtubers like but i hope you guys enjoy the fact that we really invest practically a full hour most weeks sometimes i have pre-recorded videos for you but um i just feel like that's i want to dig into stuff i don't want to just touch on this and bite that and have little snippets because that's not really engaging your brain and getting you to think deeper and more thoroughly about what you're doing and that's what i mean by don't just find a video take those seven steps and explore because there's more opportunity there for you to find more if you take a few extra moments to do those things we talked about i've got everything laid out for you um in the show notes at genealogygems.com elevenses and uh if you are new my gosh i hope that you will do this little thing we talked about this little thing we talked about which is to click the subscribe button because what it does is it puts our channel in that subscription list your favorites list and it just makes it really easy to find us again um i am going to be going through all the live chat and if you guys have questions there thank you for taking the time to leave your questions i'm going to answer them i will add those to the show notes and premium members be sure to go down to the resources section of the show notes and download your pdf you're going to want it for this week it'll guide you through everything we talked about so you can really fill it in and and find some stuff on youtube okay well i think that's it for now so hey thank you so much for joining me please tell your friends share me on facebook let people know that we're here and have them join the fun have a wonderful week i will talk to you soon [Music]

Channel: Lisa Louise Cooke's Genealogy Gems

Views: 4,307

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: find family history, how to find family history, find family history videos, family history videos, genealogy videso, genealogy videos, family history, genealogy research, family history research, videos about my family, home movies, old home movies, genealogy, lisa louise cooke, genealogy gems, elevenses with lisa

Id: AJU7A7Se_EQ

Length: 52min 1sec (3121 seconds)

Published: Thu May 27 2021