January is National Organization Month and a great time to organize your genealogy and family history archives. To help you get started, The Family Curator Denise Levenick will be visiting fourteen genealogy and family history blogs on a Blog Book Tour January 10-26 with guest articles and excerpts from her new book, How to Archive Family Keepsakes. The complete tour schedule is available at the Archive Keepsakes Blog Book Tour Page. GeneaBloggers is pleased to be the first stop on this virtual book tour with an introduction to Denise, aka The Family Curator.

5 Little-Known Facts about The Family Curator

1. Unlike many genealogy blogs that get started to chronicle family history, The Family Curator blog was born as a web journal for a high school English project. Denise set up the site to record her progress working with her grandmother’s collection of letters, documents and photos in anticipation of a student project with historical documents. At the time, she was teaching high school English and needed a high-interest project for the end of the school year. “Reading Women’s Lives” and The Family Curator were the result. Students learned basic historical research skills and practiced literary and social history analysis to uncover the story of a young woman’s life as revealed through her correspondence. Denise wrote about the project at The Family Curator and in more depth at Shades of the Departed online photography magazine.

2. Family papers and photos aren’t Denise’s only collections. She also collects vintage cookbooks, especially community cookbooks from towns she has visited or places her ancestors once lived. Her bookshelves presently hold 239 volumes. Her personal favorite is a book from her mother-in-law’s collection, Rangoon International Cook Book by the Woman’s Society of Christian Service of the Methodist English Church, published in Rangoon, Burma in 1956. Denise shared many of her books with her students to teach about varied forms of women’s personal expression.

3. Denise has been writing stories her entire life. As a grade-schooler, she published a neighborhood newspaper printed on trays of gelatin with a steno-master inkbed. Her first magazine article was published in American Girl Magazine when she was 16 years old, and she worked for the local paper throughout high school and college covering local sports, city government, social events, and writing wedding, birth and death announcements.

4. Naming practices are a bit unusual in Denise’s family. Her mother was never called by her birth name and her legal name wasn’t recorded until she was married. Denise used her maiden name for many years, abandoning it only when she after misplacing her laundry at the cleaners. She now limits her identities to Miss Penelope Dreadful (courtesy of footnoteMaven) and The Family Curator.

5. How to Archive Family Keepsakes is Denise’s first genealogy book, and her fifth published book. She has also published three gift books of sampler verse for needleworkers and an organizational guidebook titled The Holiday Handbook.

Join the Blog Book Tour for How to Archive Family Keepsakes January 10-26, 2013 for author interviews, book excerpts, giveaways, and more. Visit the Blog Book Tour Page at The Family Curator website for the complete schedule.

Proceeds from the sale of How to Archive Family Keepsakes during the Book Tour will help fund the 2013 Student Genealogy Grant founded in 2010 in honor of Denise’s mother, Suzanne Winsor Freeman.

How to Archive Family Keepsakes (Family Tree Books, 2012) ISBN 1440322236
Paperback from Family Tree Books, Amazon.com; PDF eBook from Scribd. Also, make sure your use this 10% Savings Coupon: ShopFamilyTree.