Here's something I think will be new to family trees like Ancestry.com. In the space for media you can include photos and other media types related to your family member. Of course there is not likely to be a picture of family that lived before photography was invented [unless they had the money for portraiture]. So, in family tree software, if the only picture you have is a photo of the person's gravestone, that ends up being the primary photo. Yuck!
When I'm looking at an ancestor's info I don't want the only thing I see about them to be a gravestone.
So I came up with the idea of researching the clothing they might have worn when they where living their lives and decided on drawing color pictures to put in the photo section of the media files!
Luckily there are many re-enactors and historians who have put information about historic costumes up on the web. Costumers Manifesto is one great site. Memorial Hall Museum Online, American Centuries...view from New England is another fun site for looking at our former dress and learning lots of other things about our New England ancestors. [This is where I got the pictures for my two drawings that appear here].
Sooo, I'll have to think about the furniture and utensils that they might have used and the places they lived. Did you know that the early new England settlers lived in homes that consisted of one room where everything went on? Not necessarily because they where poor [tho that was true for some at the early part of the English settlement] but because people then didn't have the same ideas of privacy that the American culture does today.
Interesting, eh?
