North Carolina Genealogy

Last time I talked about a new historic photos archive at the Asheville Citizen-Times. I think this is a great thing and would love to see more news organizations push ahead and release their older photo content for public browsing. But how is the average person to do that. We all have boxes or old pictures it seems. I know I’ve scanned quite a bit of our older picture collection. Some I’ve included on this site, but the process for attaching them here is sometimes a bit cumbersome. Are there easy ways to share those old pictures online?

Yes, there are. In addition to just setting up your own site (which, if you think about it will likely not last much past your own life unless it’s a business that can be transferred), there are other approaches to this. A site called AncientFaces.com allows free submissions of quite a bit of material from family stories, to pictures. You can tag and identify the faces in the pictures and share them for all.

Sites like Flikr have been around for a good while and my family.com is another photo sharing site geared towards having family pages with pictures. Judging by the site, this is geared more towards current pictures, but could certainly be used for posting the historical family photos as well. (They also allow audio although it’s unclear if you can upload audio, it looks as though you simply record through their web page.)

Next there is Amiglia.com which is a site for uploading and connecting pictures, videos, and calendars to a family tree structure. This creates a browsable family tree with attached media files.

Finally, there is Ancestor Archive, which is a free Genealogy Database of Vintage Family Photos. It’s free to search or submit photos. Each submitter of photos get’s a URL to give as links that shows all the photos they’ve submitted.

In addition to the above, it’s certainly possible to post your pictures in genealogy related forums. Many of these have a forum dedicated to picture uploads.