I just returned from a trip to visit my family in Dallas. Since I last visited my parents, they moved, and in their move they discovered boxes upon boxes of pictures that they had forgotten about. Most of these pictures were of our immediate family members, but there were quite a few of grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles and even very old pictures of ancestors. We spent a few hours on Saturday sorting these pictures, labeling them and divvying them among ourselves.

When my parents moved, my mom also discovered an autobiography that her mom wrote when she was diagnosed with cancer in 1989. Included in the manila envelope that held the autobiography was a travelogue of my grandmother’s trip to Athens, Greece in the early 1980s. Until this weekend, I never knew that these documents existed.

As the recognized family historian in my family, my parents and siblings basically looked to me to decide how we were going to share these family treasures. Ultimately, we decided that I would have some of the pictures scanned with a high-power scanner so that each person could have a good quality digital image of the photos that more than one person wanted. With that good quality digital image, we can reprint the photos, and more than one person can have a copy of the same photo.

We also decided that I would be responsible for digitizing the autobiography and travelogue by my grandmother. At first I thought I would re-type the autobiography, but then I remembered a post by Dick Eastman about converting PDFs to an editable text document. Once I’ve scanned the autobiography and saved it as a PDF file, I will be able to share it with anyone who wants it via Google Docs. The text file might require a bit of clean-up, as Dick explained in his post, but this clean-up will certainly take less time than me re-typing the entire autobiography, which is about 30 pages of typed text.

In my mind, Google Docs is one of the best possible ways for me to share my grandmother’s autobiography with my family members. It allows anybody who would like a hard copy to print one themselves. Everyone has direct access to the document to view any time they like, and they only have to keep track of a stack of papers if they decide to hit the print icon.

I feel really lucky to live in a time when it is easy to digitally share family treasures. While it might not ever be practical to divide family heirlooms like china, jewelry, clothing or houses we can very easily digitally share documents.

What ways have you discovered to share your family history treasures?