The Most Photographed Generation Will Have No Pictures In 10 Years!

A grateful Spokt.com user sent us the link to this article. We felt it was definitely worth sharing. He and we believe that Spokt.com gives L I F E to old photographs!
In the words of our fellow Spokt.com member, Denis Martin: “Spokt certainly provides a solution to the highlighted problem – especially with respect to cataloging and sharing the most important pictures in our lives. Facebook allows sharing immediately but it is not a great retrospective tool nor is it easily searchable. Thanks for creating and maintaining Spokt – and providing us all with a solution for the future…”
Thank you Denis!

https://mikeyostphotography.wordpress.com/2015/01/31/the-most-photographed-generation-will-have-no-pictures-in-10-years/

15 Genealogy Quotes We Love

15 Genealogy Quotes We Love:

Here are 15 of our favorite quotes about family history. Enjoy!

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you are lucky enough to be a genealogist, you are lucky enough. – Ruth Padilla

Friends come and go, but relatives tend to accumulate. – Unknown

The past is not dead. It isn’t even past. – William Faulkner

Genealogy: Where you confuse the dead and irritate the living. – Unknown

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his. – Helen Keller

If you don’t know history, you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree. – Michael Crichton

We inherit from our ancestors gifts so often taken for granted. Each of us contains within this inheritance of soul. We are links between the ages, containing past and present expectations, sacred memories and future promise. – Edward Sellner

Research is what I’m doing when I don’t what I’m doing – Wernher von Braun

We need to haunt the house of history and listen anew to the ancestors wisdom. – Maya Angelou

To forget one’s ancestors is to be a brook without a source, a tree without a root. – Chinese Porverb

Some family trees have beautiful leaves, and some have just a bunch of nuts. Remember, it is the nuts that make the tree worth shaking. – Unknown

If we tried to sink the past beneath our feet, be sure the future would not stand. – Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Most of our ancestors were not perfect ladies and gentlemen. The majority of them weren’t even mammals. – Robert Anton Wilson

The thing that interests me most about family history is the gap between the things we think we know about our families and the realities. – Jeremy Hardy

Why waste your money looking up your family tree? Just go into politics and your opponents will do it for you. – Mark Twain

– See more at: http://familyhistorydaily.com/family-history/15-genealogy-quotes-love/#sthash.1Ol6ATej.0UMQjjsl.dpuf

Your Family Tree Explained

Here is a pretty fun and explanatory video made by CGP Grey to help you figure out who is who in your tangled family tree!  After watching it, tell us the name of your Second Cousin Once Removed in the comments below.  For extra credit, tell us your Great Great Grandmother In-Law’s Grand Aunt.

Oh No! You Forgot Your Password???

An email will be sent to you within a few minutes.  Please be patient as this can take some time to be sent to your email program.  If you don’t see it in your inbox, please check your spam and junk folders to locate the email.  It is also a great idea to add “donotreply@spokt.com” and “support@spokt.com” to your “safe senders” list.  The email will look something like this:

Please click the long link embedded in the password (highlighted in yellow above). When you do, you will be taken to a page that will direct you to enter a new password.  You can also use the password you thought was correct.  In either case, whatever you enter here will be your new password going forward.  Enter your new password in the space provided and click “Update Password”.

From this point on, whenever you log in to your Spokt.com account you must use this new password.  If your internet browser remembers your passwords, it will likely try to remember your old password instead of the new one.  We recommend finding where to update your saved passwords in your internet browser application and updating the password there as well.  Regardless, you MUST make whatever changes necessary to your internet browser to allow you to type in your NEW password – even though it is most likely remembering your old password.

We hope this post is informative and helpful and improves your Spokt.com experience!

What Does an Invitation Look Like?

We frequently have Hub admins ask us what happens when they invite new users to join them on their hub using the Invite tool. This post is to help you see what the invitation looks like and what the newly invited user should be experiencing as he or she gets signed up to view your hub.

Using the Invite tool inside your hub, you should enter the person’s name and email address.  Spokt.com has already drafted the email text (shown below).  If you would like to customize your email message, you can do so by clicking on the tab titled “Customize Message” and enter in your own text for the invitation email.  If you do this, be sure to click “Update Message” when you are finished typing your custom message.  You DO NOT need to customize your email, but you are certainly welcome to.

You can see all the different areas of the Invitation tool in the image below:

When you are ready,  simply click “Invite” at the bottom of the page and your invitation will be immediately sent out to whomever you have invited.

Those people will receive an email just like this:

The newly invited user should simply click on the blue “accept invitation” link.  They should NOT click on the blue “Spokt.com” link above, as it will simply take them to our main website and the user may get confused as to what to do next.  If the “accept invitation” link does not work, they can copy and paste the URL at the bottom of the message into their browser and it should take them to a screen that looks like this:

Here the user needs to make a choice right off the bat.  If they are already a user of Spokt.com with the SAME email address you used to invite them, all they have to do is simply log in to their Spokt.com account by using the box on the right that says “I Have A Username”.  All they need to do is enter their existing password and they will be brought directly into their account where they can choose to view your hub.

If the user does not already have a Spokt.com account that has the exact SAME email address that you used to invite them, then they need to set up their new account in the larger box on the left.  The user’s email address will auto-populate into the first block. Then they need to create USERNAME for themselves.  This can be almost anything they choose, but if another user has the same username, it will not allow duplicate usernames.  For example, the username of “John Smith” is most likely taken already. They may need to create a username of “JSmith1956” or something like that. Then they should enter their first and last names (if they are not already auto-populated) and a unique password.  The password can be whatever they choose.  We recommend a six letter minimum password and also recommend using at least one number or special character.  But again, this is up to the user’s discretion.  We try not to make our password requirements too stringent.

Once they have completed all these steps, all the new user has to do is click the green “Create Account” button and they will be automatically taken to their brand new account and will be able to see the hub you have invited them to immediately.

Of course, if a new user wants to then create their own hub for their immediate family, church group, school class, or garden club (whatever they desire), they can create a new hub once they’ve logged in by clicking the words “Create Hub” at the very tip top of the page in the black bar.  They will then be guided through setting up their own hub.

Hopefully this lengthy description is helpful and will assist you in getting more and more of your associates, friends, family members, and more to join you in your new hub at Spokt.com!

As always, feel free to send us an email directly at support@spokt.com if you have specific questions about your hub or account. We love to hear from you!

Spokt.com Support Team

Updates Coming VERY Soon!

Hi everybody. We sincerely apologize for not blogging more often and make a promise here and now to never leave you hanging this long again.

We are finally out of the tumultuous migration stage and into the updates and improvements stage. A quick note on migrations: MyFamily servers were extremely intermittent and buggy during the last 3-4 weeks of migrations. After their official shut down (September 30th) we were still able to connect to their servers and we successfully migrated thousands of MyFamily sites over to Spokt. However, as time wore on, the migrations stalled, stopped completely, and frequently came back with super spotty data and information. Many users’ photos had been replaced with a basic MyFamily photo stating that their site was over the storage limit – even though this was not the case.

Suffice it to say, we were bombarded with a deluge of requests to fix the migrations – and many of them we were able to fix. However, unfortunately, there were several people whose sites we were not able to salvage. We begged and pleaded with MyFamily for more time and better connectivity… but to no avail.

Since the dust has settled from the migration period, we have updated several seemingly insignificant parts of Spokt to make it more complete and user friendly. Some of the updates you may have already seen are:

– Credit Card Payment Information: You can now update your own payment information right on Spokt.com. To do this, just log on to your account, click on “Edit Account” at the top of the page and then click the blue “Account” button in the middle of the page. There, you’ll see credit card info. You can delete existing cards and add new cards there. Be sure to click “Save Changes” at the bottom of the page any time you make a change.

– Replace Photo Option: If for some reason you have photos that were changed by MyFamily to the “Over Site Limit” photo, or a black square, you can now replace that photo with a saved photo on your computer. All the comments and posts attached to the photo stay in place and all you have to do is simply replace it with the correct photo. If you want more information on how to do this, let us know by emailing us at support@spokt.com.

– MyFamily .Zip File Upload: If a whole host of your photos were missing from your migration, we are offering the opportunity for you to send us your .zip file that you presumably downloaded from MyFamily before they shut down. We are still working on the right way to get the photos replaced in your hub, but we’d like to get the .zip files from you as quickly as possible so we can start to work on the replacement for you. To do this simply click on this link: http://spokt.com/mayflower/uploads/new.

Now the news you’ve all been waiting for…

We are about to make the updates and changes for the new Calendar feature as well as the Album (Categorization) feature. Instead of “Albums” we are calling them “Books”. We have received confirmation from our programmers that these two features will be ready and functioning before the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve. Please keep an eye out for these changes. Once they’re live, we will post about it here.

More and more features will be added in the very near future.

It goes without saying that we really truly appreciate EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. of you for your pioneering spirit. Taking the trip on the Mayflower had it’s ups and downs, and we are SO glad you all made it. We look forward to working closely with each and every one of you over the coming years to create the best private family sharing website on the internet. With your suggestions and ideas, we will do just that!

Happy Holidays everyone!

The Spokt Team