Pinterest for family history

I stumbled across this post today about creating an ancestor timeline on Pinterest and it hit me. Pinterest a great place to save sources!

I know I should keep a research log, but it's so boring. A research log is basically taking notes while you're researching so that you can go back and figure out what you found out and where you found it. It makes total sense because as soon as you find one thing about someone it opens up all kinds of other possibilities. But it also kills momentum. You find something exciting and the first thing you have to do is write it down? Buzz kill. That's where Pinterest comes in. Pinning something never kills momentum.

It's like an online research log with links to what you've found. It only takes a second to hit the pin it button (you can add the pin it button to your browser here) and add a quick description and then you have a saved link back to the source you found. The description could be as simple as the ancestor's name or it could include more details.

You could have a board for each person, one board for all of your genealogy stuff, or - and this is what I'm going to do - a board for each great-grandparent and just put stuff for that whole family line all jumbled together in there. It could be private or public and you can send the whole board or individual pins to your other family members. You could even have a shared board so that you can collaborate with the other family genealogists whether they live 10 minutes away or in another country.

Several of the genealogy sites I use have a "save source" option, but I use more than one genealogy site and sometimes I just use Google. Pinterest is a great place to save records from a variety of sites.

Well, it's been nice chatting, but I think I'll get started.

Update: Sometimes genealogy pages don't have images to pin to Pinterest. Try looking for another extension for your browser to solve this problem. The one I found for Chrome is called "Pin my Screen" and it just takes a screen shot of the page for Pinterest to pin. Here's the link.