When I first got into genealogy, I was expecting to find only a few ancestors. After all, nana's background was confusing, to say the least, and father's father was pure mystery. As it turned out, I needn't have worried. My worry, instead, became how to keep all of my father's mother's family straight. Too many dates! Too many facts! My brain was roiling. Every genealogy layout I knew just overwhelmed me.

That's when I decided to design my own approach to genealogy forms - to find the layout that was most natural for me to understand. I'm a visual person, and I'd worked in multimedia design at IBM Research, so something that emphasized images, rather than just dates, was what I needed.

What I came up with is something I call a MultiMedia Family Form. I call it that because I used to work for defense contractors, who abbreviate and pronounce everything, and mmmmfffffs sounded perfect.

A MMFF covers at least a couple, and may cover their children. The couple's name and dates is at top left. Their relationship to me is at top right. Below our relationship, I put a small descendancy outline. These don't have to be complete. They just need to remind me how I connect to them. Grandfather of a recognizable immigrant ancestor, for example. The rest of the page consists of a textual description, surrounded by images that remind me of aspects of their lives. This means I can glance at a MMFF and instantly connect names to our relationship, and remember who they are by images rather than words. I then file the MMFFs in notebooks by generation.

There's another reason I use MMFFs. They bring the person alive for me. They're not a box on a graph, or a line in a list. They're people, who lived and loved and breathed and who share my blood. I want them to live again. Emphasizing individuals in MMFFs does that for me. It might do that for you, too.