Family History Month: 30 days, 30 photos with a name

At the bottom of the box there is a photo of a woman on a bench, with a baby on her lap. It is a good photo. The light is soft, she is laughing at someone outside the frame. Nobody at the table knows who she is. Your mother thinks it might be an aunt from her father's side. The person who would have known died six years ago.

That is what this month is for.

The idea: one photo a day

October is Family History Month in the United States, and in the Netherlands it is the Maand van de Geschiedenis, the Month of History. You do not need a national month to start, but a month is a good length. Long enough to get somewhere, short enough to finish.

The plan is small on purpose. Every day in October, you take one family photo and write down four things:

1. Who is in it, with full names. Not "Grandma", but her name.
2. When, even if it is only a guess: "around 1965".
3. Where: the town, the street, the house.
4. One sentence of story. Why they were there, who took it, what happened after.

After 30 days, 30 photos have a name. That does not sound like much, until you realise that for most family boxes the number is close to zero.

Four weeks, four kinds of photo

Week	Which photos	Help
1 to 7 October	The photos you know yourself. Get into the habit.	A pencil and a notebook.
8 to 14 October	The photos only someone older knows. Call them, one photo per call.	Questions to ask once you are talking.
15 to 21 October	The faded and damaged ones. Repair a copy, so faces are visible again.	thememorypalace.ai/restore, free and without an account.
22 to 31 October	The years you have nothing from. Find out which they are, and ask the family.	thememorypalace.ai/timeline for digital photos.

How to write the names down

On the back of a print, use a soft pencil, lightly, near the edge. Never ballpoint or felt-tip: they press through or bleed into the photo. If the back is already full, or you would rather not touch the print, use a notebook with a number per photo, and write the same number lightly on the back.

For digital copies, put the names and year in the file name or in the description, so they travel with the photo. More ideas in how to date an old photograph and find out who is in it.

A few honest notes

• A repaired photo is a copy. Keep the original print and the plain scan. If you colour a black and white photo, remember that the colours are an estimate, not a memory.
• A guess is fine, if you say it is a guess. "Probably Aunt Rosa, around 1958" helps the next person more than an empty back.
• Miss a day? Do two the next day, or don't. Twenty photos with a name are twenty more than none.
• Someone has a family tree? If a cousin sends you a .ged file, thememorypalace.ai/gedcom shows who is in it, without an account. The names may help you with the faces.

On 31 October

Show the family what you found. The woman on the bench might have a name by then, because someone recognised the bench. If you want the 30 photos to stay together with their names and stories, The Memory Palace gives each one a place in a room of your family's palace, where the others can walk in and add what they remember.