I’ve been a longtime Pinterest fan and user with over 10,000 pins and more than 50 boards – you can check out my Pinterest profile HERE.

One Pinterest feature that is severely under-utilized is Secret Boards. A secret board is NOT public and can only be seen by you or other Pinterest users that you invite to the board. Secret boards can be used as a “prep” area to add pins and content BEFORE switching it to a public board.

But here is how I use them for genealogy: I have several boards where I temporarily pin items for review at a later date.  Very often I’m busy working on different projects, but something will catch my eye and I want to “save it for later.” Secret boards on Pinterest work very well for this purpose. Here are some of the boards I have:

• Genealogy Reading List: Each morning I review about 500 blog posts using my Feedly reader. Often I want to analyze an article’s content before I share it on Facebook or Twitter so I can add my commentary. I simply pin the article to this board and add a few notes to the description.

• Genealogy To Do List: When I am researching, I may come upon an online record that I don’t have time to analyze, but, again, I want to save it for later review. I pin the record, add some notes and save. Later on I can click the pin and be taken right to the online record.

• Surname Boards: I have created secret boards for each of my surnames. This is where I pin various items including Find A Grave memorials, records from Ancestry and more.

Here is a short video showing how to set up a secret board on Pinterest and how to pin items you find on the Internet, both with and without images.

©2017, copyright Thomas MacEntee. All rights reserved.