I am my family’s visual historian. I take photos and give them away to my family all the time. Thanks to social media, there is a good chance these may be seen and enjoyed more than when I shot the film, and they went into a family photo album.

While I am not working on an assigned story, I still capture our family’s story in moments. The cool thing with social media is our ability to match words with those pictures.

I still take those formal photos of our families, but the living life photos capture the personalities of each person, in my opinion, so much more.

This role often means you are just observing, but I believe long into the future, when I am no longer here, my family will cherish these and learn about their ancestors.

My mother’s dad was always documenting his family and my dad.

I grew up every Christmas with my dad having these lights pointed at us as we walked into the room. I am not sure I saw anything for a few moments. It was so bright.

This is one of the rare moments where my wife Dorie has been with two of her sisters. While getting to see them was excellent, capturing the moment for us to remember makes this so we can tell the generations who their family is and how they are all related.

Here are a few tips to make you a better visual family historian.

• Take lots of photos of your family.
• Share your photos with your family. USB Jump Drives are good.
• Use metadata to put the text with each photo. For example, be sure you have the occasion and the names of the people in the image.
• Put your photos in some storage system like Google Drive, DropBox, or other online services.
• Create photo books. I use Blurb http://www.blurb.com/user/stanleyleary.

One of the best things you can remember is how you captured your family for everyone to enjoy now and for eternity.