Using Pinterest for Family History

Pinterest is a social media network that allows you to share and discover new interests by posting or “pinning” images and videos to your own “board,” which is a collection of pins with a theme or subject. Think of it as a type of search engine like Google, Bing, or Yahoo but with its own twist. Pinterest has an estimated 200 million active monthly users (and those numbers will continue to grow). Learn more in this article by Penney Fox. She states that Pinterest has now become “a combination of a search engine and an advertising tool — the place for people to plan and aspire about what they can do to enrich their lives.” What could be more enriching than discovering and learning about your family history? Type in your selected search words and you will see images and pictures. This can be very helpful for those who do family history. You may be surprised to find out that many of your relatives are posting on Pinterest, and you may be delighted to discover photos and information that are new to you. Not only that, but you will see where these are stored which may lead to finding lost relatives!

In a previous blog post I wrote about using social media for family history:

Social media has been referred to as “the new language of family history,” and The Family History Guide is here to help anyone learn to speak it! In addition to suggestions found in Social Media Activities for Youth, Families, and Individuals, more tools for learning and using social media for family history are listed in Project 7, Goal 3 (FamilySearch) or Project 6 Goal 3 for Ancestry, MyHeritage, or Findmypast. For many people in our modern world, social media is the preferred platform for sharing stories. In an article entitled, Social Media: Real-time Family History in the First Person, Steven and Jill Decker explain that “Never has so much first-person family history been contributed by so many – and most do not even realize they are doing it. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media outlets such as Pinterest, are forces that can be utilized to document and share a family’s history in the here and now. They are modern methods to journal our activities and, unlike handwritten diaries and journals, they are accessible to multiple “friends” or “followers” at the same time. Often the history is accompanied by photographs.” With social media available in so many forms, blogger Ellen Bahr asks the question, “Shouldn’t we be taking advantage of it?” She discusses the ways we can tap into social media resources in her article Hashtags, Tweets, and Blogs: The New Language of Family History.

There is definitely a learning curve, but there are also many online tutorials and articles to help you learn how to use Pinterest for family history. For example, read these helpful tips by Ellen Bahr in her FamilySearch post, Just Pin It! The Power of Pinterest For Family History:

At the 2014 Conference on Family History & Genealogy at BYU, Valerie Elkins, a family history specialist, blogger, and avid pinner, shared how she collects and saves genealogy-related pins. She warned that to make the most of your time you must stay focused on the task at hand or you can easily get distracted (Oh look! A cute outfit!).

Here are some of the most helpful tips for that she recommends for pinners:

Create specific boards. If you file everything under the broad title ‘Family History’, it will be difficult to find exactly what you want later. Subcategories such as ‘Archives’, ‘Reunions’, or ‘Photography’ will help refine your searches.

Check out to see what other people are pinning. Follow genealogy enthusiasts who have collected useful pins and ‘raid’ their boards, making your finding time shorter and more productive.

Just pin it! You can always delete things later that don’t fit the bill. Chances are if you go looking for that specific pin you passed by earlier, you won’t find it.

Just do it! Don’t pin things and then never follow up on those wonderful ideas. (There are people who actually do that. You know who you are.)

Learn about how to combine FamilySearch and Pinterest for family history from Lisa Louise Cooke: