Use Pinterest to Share Your History

You can create Secret Boards on Pinterest that can only be seen by people you invite.

Wait! It doesn’t have to be public. When you use Pinterest, you can have Secret Boards that are shared only with the people you choose? Of course you don’t have to make it private, but I just don’t want you to dismiss this idea for the wrong reasons.

As you know, Pinterest is all about images. Well, mostly it’s about images, but you also get to post up to 500 characters in the description of any image that you post. Although you can have up to 200,000 Pins on Pinterest, I highly recommend trying to keep it interesting by selecting meaningful images.

There are countless ways that you can use Pinterest to capture your own history or your family history, but here are seven suggestions to get your creative juices flowing.

1. A Memoir Board – In a memoir, you’re telling a story about a certain event or time period in your life. You may well have photos from that time that help capture part of the story, but your personal photos alone may not be enough. Are there pages in your diary that could be photographed and included? You can take photos of possessions, newspaper clippings, or scrapbook pages if they help tell the story. You can also find photos on the Internet that might fill in the blanks. If you can’t find an image for a certain part of the story, hire someone on Fiverr.com ($5.50) to create it for you.
   
2. Autobiography Boards – Divide your life into chapters and create a board for each one. For each board create the details of the story with your photos as well as any other images you can use to fill in the details. See Memoir Board above for ideas.
3. Travelogue Board – You could have one board that includes a little something from each trip or you could have one board for each trip
4. Scrapbook Board – Scrapbooks are wonderful, but sometimes our old scrapbooks get put away in dark places and never see the light of day. When we do find them, they aren’t always in the best condition. So why not take photos of the most meaningful stuff in those scrapbooks and post them to a scrapbook board on Pinterest. That way to you can easily visit it anytime you want to reminisce or you  can share it with anyone else who might be interested.
5. Photo Boards Galore – You could create a photo board for each person you want to include. Rather than toss in every photo you find, choose photos that have a story worth telling. If the story isn’t fully captured by the photo, then add the details to the description. Besides individual boards, you could have boards for things like Vacations, Birthdays, Anniversaries or any other theme that’s meaningful to you.
6. Valuable Documents Board – I have a friend who has a box full of letters that her grandfather and grandmother exchanged during World War II. She wants to share them with her children and grandchildren and make some commentary on each one. 500 characters may or may not be enough for her project, but it might be enough for yours.
7. Genealogy Board – If you have one of those family trees that’s just too big to fit on a piece of paper or a computer screen, you could always divide it up. As you start branching out, just put links in the description to other Pins that include the next branch.  You may have to put each section up first and then go back and edit the descriptions.