The other day, I received an email that made me laugh. The email was from Ancestry.com, and the title of the email was “Ancestors Make the Perfect Stocking Stuffers”. Obviously it was an email designed to advertise gift memberships to Ancestry.com, but it still made me giggle as I pictured adults walking into their living rooms and seeing the ghosts of long-deceased relatives sitting in Christmas stockings hung from the mantel. Okay, so I have a very active imagination, but there really is truth in the notion that beginning and expert genealogists alike might appreciate a gift membership to Ancestry.com or another genealogy research web site or service.
This led me to look around the web to see what other kinds of meaningful genealogy gifts you could give the family historian on your list this year. If you know that the genealogy buff on your gift list has recently run into a brick wall and you also know that he or she would not be insulted by getting a little professional help, you can get gift certificates for the services of professional genealogists. Much like gift certificates for a massage or a hair cut, these gift certificates can help even a very advanced researcher untie the knots and work out the tangles in their research so they can get it moving forward again.
If you are searching for a gift for a genealogist who you know uses (or would like to begin using) their iPhone or iPad for genealogy research, a gift certificate to the Apple’s App Store could be just the thing that they are wishing for. Someone who has boxes and boxes of precious photographs and negatives may welcome a digital film scanner or a gift certificate for one of the many services that digitizes old photos and negatives. My dad is still dutifully chipping away at his boxes of negatives with the scanner that my sister bought for him last year, and he is very happy with it.
These are just a few of many great genealogy-themed gift ideas that are out there. What other great genealogy gifts have you given or received?
Photo by earl53 on morguefile.com.