My father and grandfather were both geneology enthusiasts. Both have passed on and I have most of their stuff at my office in file folder boxes. I started building the family tree yesterday on ancestry.com after seeing Steve Buscemi on "Who Do You Think You Are" and I was able to find a lot of information. What I'd like to do is to incorporate what my father researched with the photos and stories and instead of having them in boxes of files, I'm planning to put them in 3 ringed notebooks - mostly 8.5x11 sized and interspersing photos and scrapbook pages with the many pages of text that I already have. I'd like to bring the pages to life and make them more interesting. I'd like to tell the stories or at least, if the stories aren't there, incorporate my family's story into American and World history. I started on this project when I was a senior at Eckerd College in 1992, I'm ready to pick up that project again. But just a little at a time. I've signed up for a year at Ancestry.com - it was $150 which seems a little pricey, but if I use it a little everyday for a year then it doesn't seem like that much. I'm planning to print out most of what I do so that after the year I can get out of Ancestry's payment plan and just have my own scrapbook. I also think it would be fun if some of my family got involved so that it was a family project kind of thing.
Yesterday, I was interested in tracing my materal grandmother's side of the family back to Ireland after a comment my daughter made on St. Patty's Day when she seriously questioned that we were actually Irish - now I've got proof - we are.
Here's the first couple of scrapbook pages - it is actually one page - that is a 12x12 scrapbook page that is two sided and one side is a pocket made with machine stitching full of printouts of census records and other random bits I found on my Grandma Grace Flavin Cunningham. I was looking for our connection to Ireland after my daughter didn't believe me on St. Patrick's Day when I told her we were Irish - now we know exactly how we are Irish. Too cool.
Here's the back pocket side:
I actually printed out the family tree from my daugther back to her great-great-great-great grandparents in Ireland and pasted that onto the outside of the pocket and highlighted the Irish born relatives with some Cherry Arte rub-ons. Other supplies include: Me and My Big Ideas, 7gypsies, Heidi Grace, K&Company, Crate Paper, Jenni Bowlin, and We R Memory Keepers. Here are some more details:
I'm so excited about bringing our family history to the pages of my current scrapbooks and to document by scrapbooking all the family history photos documents I already have. I'd like to do this in a way that makes the family history interesting to my kids by finding connections from now to the past. For example, when I was in Ireland I went to Cork but had no idea thats where our family was from - now I can make a page about that; and my son loves building things and his great-grandfather actually built the building that is now Stetson Law School where Charlie and I both went to school. I want the family history to be interesting and inviting and entertaining and fun.
P.S. Of course I'm scrapbooking with scanned images and not putting big stickers over old photos!
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