Pass It Down Reinvents the Greeting Card to Help Capture Family Memories

Dick Eastman · July 18, 2017 · Announcements · No Comments

I haven’t had this in my hands yet but it certainly looks interesting. Here is the announcement from Pass It Down:

greetingStory™ makes it simple and fun to capture family stories one greeting card at a time.

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Chattanooga, Tenn. (July 18, 2017) – Pass It Down, an award-winning storytelling platform that makes it easy to digitally record and preserve family memories, announced today the launch of its first physical product, greetingStory™. greetingStory™ reinvents the greeting card, making it easy to capture family memories and handwriting, reconnect with loved ones and preserve family stories.

“Our goal at Pass It Down is to create innovative and affordable ways for every family to capture their treasured memories,” said Pass It Down CEO and Founder Chris Cummings. “Today’s technology allows us to simplify everything we do, and we think capturing and sharing family memories should be no different. With the launch of greetingStory™, families have an effortless, interactive and effective way to capture each of their special memories, one question at a time.”

greetingStory™ is great in its simplicity. Each greetingStory™ card features a question on the cover, with included tips and instructions from top biographers to help guide loved ones in sharing their memories. The cards feature two prominent spaces to share memories and to capture loved one’s handwriting. Every card includes a QR code on the back, allowing the user to upload a loved one’s story into the Pass It Down platform. The platform can also host additional video, audio, text and photos, completing the story. A complete story can be shared with the entire family, serving as a permanent, digital memory book for everyone.

Families can choose between two options for greetingStory cards. Worldwide, Pass It Down offers greetingStory™ Memory Boxes that include 12, 24 or 48 cards and envelopes. In the US, Pass It Down offers a subscription model where you can send a family member one, two or four cards per month. Each card includes a pre-paid return envelope to send the card back to the customer.

“Imagine being able to send your mom or dad 24 cards a year, in a personalized envelope, asking about their life and their legacy. We automate the process for families, and our pre-paid return envelopes ensure that it is extremely simple for your relative to get the cards back to you” said Cummings.

For more information about greetingStory, please visit www.passitdown.com or connect with Pass It Down on Twitter (@passitdown).

Family Buys Hilarious Birthday Card for Grandpa, Finds Out it has an Old Family Photo

Dick Eastman · June 27, 2017 · Photography · 4 Comments

Family photos are where you find them!
A 12-year-old in Kansas recently found a hilarious card to give to her grandfather for his 74th birthday. The card had a very old-fashioned family photo on the front, with everyone looking very stern and serious. On top it said, “It’s your birthday!” Her mother also laughed when she saw the card. Then she stopped laughing when she looked closer.

A man in the photo looked a lot like her grandfather and of her great-grandmother. The family gave the card to the 74-year-old man celebrating his birthday. He got all excited as he realized the picture was of his father, his grandmother, and of a number of his other relatives! It was a photo he had never seen before.

In fact, the family eventually was able to locate the original photo the card was made from. The family identified almost everyone in the photo that was taken in 1906 at a wedding.
You can read the details in an article in the Epoch Times web site at: http://bit.ly/2taHCeC.
My thanks to newsletter reader Karen Parker for telling me about this story.

Huge Genealogical Database of Ukrainians Born in 1650–1920 is Now Online

Dick Eastman · June 26, 2017 · Online Sites · 3 Comments

According to EuroMaiden Press at http://bit.ly/2tbqm9k:

A huge database of people born in the territory of contemporary Ukraine between 1650 and 1920 became available online this week. Its opening crowned the four-year efforts of activists to digitize, systematize, and assemble countless entries from historical documents—but is not the final point of the project.

The database includes 2.56 mn people and is expected to reach 4 to 5 mn in 2019. The access to its contents is and will remain free of charge. The sources of data are manifold: birth registers, fiscal and parish censuses, lists of nobility, voters, the military, and victims of repressions, address directories, and other documents produced under the Tsardom of Muscovy, Russian and Habsburg Empires, Poland and the Soviet Union. A Roman-letter version of the data index is reportedly to be enabled in the coming months.

All the users who register profiles on the project’s website pra.in.ua can construct their own family trees. Nearly 18 thousand trees have been created in the first couple of days following the official inauguration of the site.

You can read the full article at: http://bit.ly/2tbqm9k.
I normally look at web sites and make a quick evaluation before I write about them. However, the web site at https://pra.in.ua/ is in Ukrainian, not one of my languages. I will simply mention the site and leave it to you, the reader, to decide how useful it is for you. I assume you can read Ukrainian.
I did attempt to use Google Translate but the results were mixed. For instance, I wondered if there is a fee to use this site. Google translates reports, “To support the project financially. We have access to the database free of charge, but to base the project developed and increased resources are needed.”
O)n a different web page, Google Translate provided the following words: “Access to the database is free. All costs of creating the portal, its administration, technical support, development, work with documents and content indexing database implemented entirely by donations from outside users.”
The Ukrainian births database is available at: https://pra.in.ua.
The article in the EuroMaiden Press reports, “A Roman-letter version of the data index is reportedly to be enabled in the coming months.”