Last Minute Legacy Gifts

There has recently been a flurry of new products related to capturing social media posts, digitizing images and letters, as well as platforms for capturing audio stories. This was discussed in an earlier WLP post.
But which one do you choose as a gift in the short week before Christmas? Turn around time is the limiting factor. What can you still accomplish in such a short time?
Several options are still viable as gifts.

Ancestry.com Gift Subscription

Ancestry.com is the best known commercial genealogical records service. It offers subscriptions that are easy to give. The person to whom you are giving must have an email address and you need to provide a start date for the subscription.

What Ancestry calls a U.S. Discovery gift allows access to all U.S. records:

12 months $169
6 months $89

What Ancestry calls a World Explorer gift allows access to U.S. and international records:

12 months$299 $269

6 months$149 $134

Careful scrutiny of all records must be made if the service is to be used to create factual family trees. Some training of the person you gift might be necessary. For example, no one should presume that anyone else’s shared Family Trees are accurate. Evidence must be verified with birth, census, government, marriage and death records.

There can easily be scores of people with the same name and birth year as your relative. Finding the right person to link into your ancestral tree requires verification of all information points in a person’s life including geographic location, documentation of immediate family members, and other documentation of plausible continuity.

Legacy Box Gift Package

Legacy Box is a spin off of Southtree. Legacy Box offers less extensive servives than Southtree. Basically you just subscribe, or subscribe for someone, and the company will send a crush-proof box, a welcome guide, a prepaid FedEx shipping label, as well as individual barcode labels for each piece of media to be sent to be digitized. Various packages are offered; the Starter as they call the least expensive of their packages allows you to ship three tapes or films or 3 sets of 25 pictures each to them for digitization. I believe you can also mix and match with 25 pictures swapping for 1 tape.

If you have a more complex project that includes audio tapes, you might want to gift a package from Southtree that provides more extensive services and more individualized services, for which the mass market Legacy Box services were not designed.

Of course you can always gift your time and efforts to do these things yourself. I will cover a bit of how to, should you want to give the tools for a do-it-yourself legacy project will follow tomorrow.

I received no compensation for this information article. This post contains no recommendations; it merely sharing information that may be of use for those of us who are still searching for the perfect legacy-inspired gifts.

Comments

Doreen McGettigan

December 14, 2015 at 10:45 am

These are fabulous gift suggestions. Thank you for sharing them.

Carol Cassara

December 14, 2015 at 1:14 pm

Oooh. Really, really unique and excellent gifting ideas. I love them!

- Nancy Hill
  
  December 14, 2015 at 2:51 pm
  
  Thanks Carol! That is why I shared ’em.
  
Stacia Friedman

December 14, 2015 at 7:20 pm

What a fabulous idea! I used Ancestry to find out where my grandparents came from. It was an incredible experience.

Estelle

December 15, 2015 at 5:07 am

These are great resources for people interested in genealogy!

Kimberly

December 15, 2015 at 9:58 am

Such a unique concept for gift giving. There are so many interesting companies out there offering clever ideas for capturing memories. Thank you for highlighting these!
Kimberly XO