Anne Hart - Creating Family Newsletters & Time Capsules: How to Publish Multimedia Genealogy Periodicals or Gift Booklets

Creating Family Newsletters & Time Capsules

How to Publish Multimedia Genealogy Periodicals or Gift Booklets

Anne Hart

ASJA Press

New York Lincoln Shanghai

Creating Family Newsletters & Time Capsules How to Publish Multimedia Genealogy Periodicals or Gift Booklets

Copyright 2006 by Anne Hart

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

ASJA Press
an imprint of iUniverse, Inc.

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ISBN-13: 978-0-595-39872-0

ISBN: 978-1-5320-0021-8 (ebook)

ISBN-10: 0-595-39872-3

Contents

Acknowledgements and thanks to Mr. Marlow S. Bumpus of Silvana, Washington for the written permission letter on file, dated 27 February 2006 to publish the historical Hart-Bumpus photos in this book, which appear on the cover as part of the photo collage.

What Problems You Can Solve & Results Obtain Using Family Newsletters

DESCRIPTION OF BUSINESS

Tired of only paper print annual family newsletters? Try multimediavideo with text, music, voice, and pictures. Put warmth, kindness, and inspiration into photos, video, and text to cheer up viewers and readers. The annual family video and print newsletter, handwritten newsletter template using circles for messages and squares for photos, or a photo and text calendar delivers energy through celebration of life. Use a new, dramatic viewpoint, whats called a fresh news angle. Its something so new that viewers learn information that can be used in a different way. Make multimedia newsletters.

Its like discovering hidden markets or exploring new patterns and spaces. What are the unique qualities of your information? Contrast and balance the dynamic imagery.

What actions can you use? Emphasize what the family (or corporate) tradition represents. How do visionary events, change, the future, and reality contrast or compare with solidarity, energy, roots, genealogy, and tradition? How does it all work together as energy and character that provide the foundation of the family or corporation? These tips can be used both for video or print family newsletters and corporate case history success story newsletters.

1. Children: Have each child write about what they have done or are doing on an annual basis. If the child is too young, summarize in a short paragraph any updates.
2. Parents: Keep a separate business newsletter for updates on your business. Decide whether you want to talk about acts of kindness, promote yourself or your achievements, or ask about others. Whats left to discuss? Repairing the house? Choose a topic you want to emphasize that is universal, simple, and about values and commitment or teach a new subject to your readers with universal appeal with which they all can identify.
3. Information: How efficient and effective is your news information? Be informative rather than directive. Present information instead of giving them directions as commands. What are you expert at? What are you beginning to study that eventually you will have acquired expertise? What do you have time to do and write about that is not overwhelming you with overwork?
4. Shorten Text: Use large page margins on your newsletter text. Keep videos to 7 minutes before you break for another topic so viewers can pause. On videos, dont read from a script. Talk into the camera.
5. Charisma: Be passionate, enthusiastic, and charismatic in your writing. Use humor and jokes in good taste. Use the element of surprise for humor, not disdain. Instead of flat writing, emphasize acts of kindness you and your children have done.
6. Kindness: What behavior helps your writing to be more animated rather than flat in tone and mood or texture? Each act of kindness measures a range of change in your growth. Emphasize the range of change as forward movement. Let your newsletter pay it forward as it has been said in support groups, by encouraging readers to keep passing forward the acts of kindness to others as a choice for growth, change, and vision.
7. Balance: Each topic should be equal in length or at least balanced. Dont write the entire newsletter about one topic and then squeeze in a paragraph on another issue.
8. Relationships: Explain and define who each person is. Put a date on each event or photo along with the name and the relationship. Example: This is a photo of ABCD, my paternal niece taken on July 4, 2006, at the Worlds Fair in EFGH, California.
9. Scrapbooks on DVDs: Decide whether you want your newsletter in text and on a CD or DVD or in print/paper/text form with different information from an interview or life story highlights placed on DVDs or CDs that you enclose with the paper newsletter. Or would you send the newsletter as a PDF file by email? A document file? Mailed in an envelope as a paper? Or saved on DVD as text along with video, with the print edition mailed together? Provide formats such that anyone can read the dated information with or without a machine to play the disc.
10. Time Capsules of Humor: Use uplifting, tasteful jokes, poems, art, video, writing, life story highlights, and volunteer work experiences to connect your extended family to community service which extends your family of humankinds accomplishments even further. Create an annual time capsule from your conception of an annual family newsletter or video newsletter. The time capsule then becomes an heirloom that can be conserved and preserved for future generations catalogued by year.

What to Include

Corporate Case Histories and Success Stories or Extended Families News:

Your family video or print newsletter can be a business that you do for other clients. Decide whether youd like to do corporate case histories and success stories or family history and genealogy as newsletters either in print and text paper or on DVDs and CDs or all of these for all types of clients-family, corporate, or professional, educational/institutional.

A professional newsletter could focus on a medical or legal practice, for example, or other professional. A business newsletter can emphasize the work of a corporation, its history, or an individual business. One example would be the work of a contractor or developer, architect, or independent teacher, dentist, engineer, computer programmer, artist, musician, author, consultant, or life, job, and image coach.

Family newsletters could reach out to extended families or include alumni reunions, genealogy and DNA-driven family history and ancestry surname groups. You choose your emphasis. Include more types of newsletters, whether DVD or text.

Here are what to put into your video newsletter

1. Significant events
2. Life stories
3. Travel photos
4. Photos of events such as weddings, graduations, or grand openings
5. News of births or childbirth video clips (leave out the gore)
6. Summaries
7. Jokes
8. Memorabilia and trivia with useful facts, such as statistics
9. Joy of life and fun events
10. Wise sayings and original proverbs or quotes with source of origin
11. Mourning and/or celebration of life events
12. Hobbies, crafts, art, writings, poems
13. Sports enjoyed
14. Reading group: Start a family or corporate book club and discuss reading
15. Old time radio clubs, public domain video, or exchanging gifts of purchased videos from stores