Heritage Scrapbooks
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Genealogy In Scrapbooks - Preserving Our Past!
By Merrideth Chenoweth
Many scrapbookers are also genealogists; and no wonder, since scrapbooking is a way of preserving our lives, and the lives our families. With care and consideration genealogy and family history can very easily be incorporated into scrapbooking with or without photos of your ancestors! Recently this has been a major focus of my scrapbooking energies, though I have been compiling my genealogy for more than 10 years.
Let’s look at ways we can all incorporate family history into our scrapbooking!
Getting Started
Maybe you’re like me and have worked on your genealogy for a long time. That’s good. If not, well you’ve got a long road of misery and drudgery ahead of you. We’re looking at endless nights tied to the computer, weighed down by names, and dates and facts without any relief in sight. You’ll be trudging through dusty books in some deep dark corner of your local library and suffering paper cut after paper cut as you dig in the deep dark hole of history.
Well, nah, not really!
Genealogy is not as dramatic as all that! It can be as easy as downloading a form called a pedigree chart and filling in the blanks. (Download a pedigree chart here. Following the instructions provided.) There are numerous web sites out there dedicated to assisting you in your search for your roots! Some are free like the LDS Family Search Site and the US GenWeb Project; and some cost money like Ancestry.com, and Heritage Quest. Often times Ancestry and Heritage Quest can be accessed for free at your local library!
Got the Goods - Now What?!
OK, so now you’ve gone back a few generations and gotten at least the names of your ancestors - what do you do with it all? That’s the fun part! In my children’s books the very first page is their family tree. It’s a good way to start the book to remind them that though the entire scrapbook is of them, they are a product of the other people on that tree with them. I use a family tree because it is SO easy to make and would be hard to mess it up!
After the family tree is in the front of the book, I work my way from the first person (whose book is it?) followed by a page for their spouse then each of their children (if applicable.)
The next page would be about the preceding generation (the first person’s parents) starting with the father, then the mother, then pages for each sibling. It continues in this vein for subsequent generations. Depending on how many children each generation has you may end up with quite a large book, or a very skinny one!
More Than a Name!
Unfortunately, even though I am personally addicted to my camera, my ancestors have not always been the best photographers. Luckily for me though (and for you too if you share my dilemma) there’s more to scrapbooks than just photographs!
For instance: I have only one photograph of my Granny Pat from a few years before I was born. Due to family dynamics I was never able to meet Granny Pat in person. I occasionally complete a layout with only one photograph, but in trying to capture the essence of a person, only one picture and a few dates and no memorabilia would be a little dry! BUT, I do have letters and cards she had sent me over the years.
So I improvised, enlarged the one measly photograph, and in addition to journaling about her vital statistics (dates and places of birth, marriage, and death) I included a few of the letters she had sent me. Viola! Granny Pat is no longer just the 40-something woman in the grainy photograph, she’s a vital human being with feelings and thoughts of her own!
There is another lesson in this story besides creative problem solving, and it is: no one is here forever! You need to seek out older family members and interview them now before it is too late to do so! Illness, family dynamics and death separate us too soon from those who have helped to form our families, and have helped to mould who we are a people. For more information about conducting family interviews, visit The Center for Life Story Preservation’s website!
In addition to photographs, letters and interviews, there are many more things you can include on a person’s page. Some of the ideas I’ve come up with are: announcements (birth, baptismal, graduation, marriage), newspaper articles including obituaries, writings or artwork created by the individual, family stories told about this person, photographs of their favorite things, journaling about your favorite memory of the individual. Obviously this is just a short list, but it can give you a good foundation!
Happy hunting for your family roots and as always, happy scrapping!