Hyperscrapbooking
Here’s a new way to describe the site: hyperscrapbooking.
As I wrote on the home page, “WikiTree is like hyperscrapbooking. It’s not just for collaborative family history. It’s a powerful tool for preserving and sharing anything we care about.”
The idea for looking at the website as a digital scrapbook came from Lainey Millen, the sister of my old friend and mentor, Andrea Millen Rich. Lainey wrote to me, “I do find that it is very different that Ancestry.Com and others similar to it. It seems to be more of a tree + scrapbook to me.”
The scrapbook aspect of WikiTree has been overlooked. I have tended to describe our free-space pages — for family heirlooms, events, homes, pets, or anything else — as ways to grow history. And that is how I see them. If I create a page for, say, my great-grandfather’s model ships, this becomes a potential resource for anyone researching 19th century tallships or New England folk art carving or whatever else that I may not ever expect.
Calling it “history” is very abstract. Scrapbooking is something many of us can relate to. It gives us a clearer frame of reference for what you can do with these pages.
Chris
P.S. Lainey was also asking me about the lack of a search engine. This finally got me off my butt to add one. See the bottom of any WikiTree page.