Using LifeCapsules in Personal Historian 2

Our lives are shaped by more than just the things we do.  Historical events and cultural happenings (music, tv, movies, radio) all impact our lives and the things we do.  We’ve talked about adding stories to create a personal history, but Personal Historian allows you to add context to a person’s life with LifeCapsules.

A LifeCapsule lets you add topics to your story list about historical and religious events, epidemics, cultural happenings, and even “memory triggers”.  When you add a LifeCapsule to your file, Personal Historian will include topics in your main screen story list.  So, for example, if you add a U.S. history LifeCapsule, you will see historical events which occurred during the person’s life intermingled with your own stories.  In this sample screen you will see that several different LifeCapsules have been imported (click the image to see it in full resolution).

Now while you may want to write a story for certain LifeCapsule topics that get added, they are also useful for triggering other memories that you may want to write about instead.  For example, you might not want to write a story about the start of the Great Depression, but showing that it occurred during the teen years of a person might give you more insight into some of their behaviors later in life.

In addition to expanding the existing LifeCapsules, Personal Historian 2 adds a number of new LifeCapsules.  Included are (remember that features new in PH2 are bold):

  • African American history
  • Australian history
  • British history
  • Canadian history
  • Catholic history
  • Epidemics
  • Foods
  • Industrial Revolution
  • Inventions
  • Jewish history
  • LDS history
  • Memory triggers
  • Movies
  • Music
  • Radio shows
  • Television
  • Toys and Games
  • U.S. history
  • U.S. holidays

Stories added by importing a LifeCapsule work just like your own stories… you can edit them, delete them, filter or search by them, and include or exclude them in your published personal histories.

In addition, we will be releasing a new LifeCapsule Editor about a month after PH2 is released, so you will be able to create your own LifeCapsules to use and share with others.

In our next sneak peek we’ll look at some of the new tools in Personal Historian 2, including the new Person and Place Lists which you can use for tagging stories.

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