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Monday, January 30, 2012

Family History Project

How many of you have a collection of photos from earlier generations? How many of you know who those people are and where they fall or what branch they take place on your family tree?

Well, I was lucky enough to be reminded that my parents have several old photos from my grandparents on both sides of the family. I'm also very lucky to have a sis-in-law who majored in geneology! She had put together a pedigree chart a few years ago. It was just sitting in a file cabinet waiting for me to rescue it and bring it to life!

Well, I'm working on that part anyway.

I'm including some pictures of my process. I have a lot of pictures to go through, but have done a good amounting of sorting. My goal is to sort and label everything so future generations don't have to. I'm putting many of the black and white photos in protective sheet protector sleeves. I'm putting them in binders. One binder for my mom's side of the family and one for my father's side.

Having a binder for each side of the family will help with my research. I labeled pictures by putting label stickers on the outside of the sheet protectors. If I didn't have a name for the person or people in the photo, I just labeled it "unknown" for now because I may be able to discover who they are later - which did actually happen once already. That was very exciting!

Next thing I'm doing is using the information from the pedigree chart my SIL put together and adding pictures to the names -- therefore, giving it life and even more meaning when you can have a face with the name! I started this in Photoshop. Then, my plan is to lay out a booklet in InDesign using Blurb. They have a program for us InDesign users. They also have templates like Shutterfly and Snapfish. Those are really nice, but I don't like to be too restricted with my design. I have more things to include and I think it's hard to stay within their parameters for this project. So Blurb it is!

Here are a few pictures. This is a project that will take some time to complete. I'm going to be asking family members to include stories or bits of information, such as a favorite dessert our grandmas made or a sentimental item in our home growing up, etc. I want this book to give my children and future generation an insight into our lives and who we are/were.

If you're thinking about starting a family history album/book/scrapbook a good book to help you get started and one that I'm using along the way is Family History Scrapbooking by Becky Higgins. I got mine from our local library and it has been incredibly helpful!!

Here's my mess that I'm very blessed to have: 


My computer area will never be the same - at least for a while anyway!


Here is just a small group of photos for sorting:



Here are some of the photos I organized by person into a photo box (I used envelopes for the smaller pictures like school pics to keep them all together):


Here's one of the binders with old photos. I used page protectors for 8.5 x 11 sheets and sheets for 
4x6 photos: 


More organizing:


Can't wait to show you more as my project gets on it way! 

Thanks for stopping by today!

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