Time to Re-Group

 Blogging friends -- if you are still out there! -- it is time for me to re-group! The store where I teach stopped offering classes in mid-March when things started shutting down. Since then, I've been busier than ever making kits to sell online and am just now truly coming up for air.  Our dining room (and my craft room) has pretty much looked like some version of this since March.

Recently, I made a list of all the projects I've completed since this thing started and totalled it up. No wonder I feel like my head is spinning! I have designed 23 different kits (cards, scrapbook pages, tags, treat bags, etc.) and made 1020 kits to sell since March. That has kept me crazy busy with almost no let-up but I'm thankful I love what I do and can contribute in some small way!

But now... I've finished up all of my Christmas-themed kits, which is a huge relief. Christmas is our busiest time and is always a huge push for me. Now I'm truly enjoying a bit of free time to re-group.

Over the past few months, I've worked sporadically on my family history albums, trying to carve out a few hours here and there. I am pleased to report that I'm making noticeable progress! I've worked my way up through the generations to my parents and am now working on their section of the album. 

 

   Many moons ago, I wrote about setting up Life Binders for my parents and grandparents, an idea I picked up in a genealogy class. These 3-ring notebooks are just a temporary holding place for memorabilia that might eventually make it into the scrapbook. It was a Life Binder that helped me save the wedding invitation in the photo above plus a related newspaper article and a lot of memorabilia from my parents' lives so I could find it when I was ready for it.

I've been inching my way through these binders and have emptied my grandparents' binders and now my mom's, placing the memorabilia into an appropriate section of the family history binders. It's been a long time coming and it made me kind of giddy to empty another binder! Seriously, if there is one piece of advice I could offer anyone just starting to sort through a mountain of family history, it's this. The Life Binder will be your anchor.

Using the information from my Life Binders, I set up sections in my family history binder for highlights of my mom's employment...

...and also her many hobbies. In later years she enjoyed painting so I found a way to incorporate some examples of her artwork. Of course, I have many of her actual canvas paintings in various places around the house.

I still have several sections of my dad's Life Binder to work through, but I'm now  ready to start working my way through the photos I have from my parents' first few years of marriage, my birth, and beyond.  Although working on my parents' section of the album has been sad, I am really glad to get started documenting their lives. And I am excited to work on my own story. I've often wondered if I'd ever make my way to 1961 when I was born...and suprised to say that I'm almost there! 

So here's to re-grouping...coming up for air...and tackling a few of these important projects on my list.

Stay well, friends.
Janet

 

 

Heritage Album Update

It's been a LONG time since I've updated my blog on much of anything, I know. Let me try to jump back into the swing of things with an update on my heritage albums. Of all the scrapbooking I've done, making my heritage albums has been one of the most rewarding projects. If you haven't documented your own family's story, I hope you'll be encouraged to do so by this post!

 

In recent months, I've spent most of my personal scrapbooking time and energy on this big project and I'm so happy with the progress I've made. I have seven albums in the works or complete. Now I'm ready to start the section for my parents and my own childhood. So that is big progress! 

In this post, I'll share some of one of the albums that I consider "done" -- at least as done as it CAN be for the time being. I'm continuing to research my family via Ancestry so will be adding to the my family tree as I go along. But the actual photos and memorabilia I have for this particular line are now all in the album, safely stored for posterity.

I have four sets of albums, two for my dad's side of the family and two for my mom's side. This album is for the Blood family, my dad's mother's side. My grandma's maiden name was Blood and she was the keeper of our family's genealogy, so it's been fun diving into her side of the tree. I've learned a lot and have much more to discover.

 

Now that I've filled out several generations of my family tree with some degree of confidence, I've printed a tree to go in the front part of the album. Unfortunately Ancestry no longer has a good "print" function (they direct you to go to a third party site where you can pay to print a poster or book, or print a test copy with limited formatting options). So I've done the next best thing: Pulled a screenshot of my tree directly from Ancestry and added text box overlays with additional details. It's not super clear but it's readable and at least provides a roadmap to who's who in the album. As time goes on, I will update and hopefully print more generations.

The album itself is divided into tabbed sections by each set of grandparents, beginning with my great grandparents in this case. I started each section with a picture of the grandparents.

 

  Then I included the earliest pictures I have of them as a couple and throughout their marriage. My great grandma lived a long life. She was interviewed by the local paper in her golden years, so I included a copy of that article in which she describes her family's life and activities.

 

Side note: If you're new to family history, you should definitely check out Newspapers.com. It's not free but is a treasure trove of historical newspaper articles from all over the country. I've found a ton of information about many ancestors through this site. Ancestry sometimes offers a discounted subscription for members.

I am lucky to have quite a few photos of my great grandparents. I knew my great grandma as she lived just up the street from us, but my great grandpa died just before I was born.

To this marriage, six children were born. Since they are not listed on the family tree, I included a "Family Group Sheet" from Ancestry in each section of the album which details them all. Again, Ancestry doesn't provide a good way to print this chart so I resorted to screenshots, piecing it together to fit on one page. My hope is that this will clarify who is who in each family. The people at the top are my great grandparents, and my grandma is one of their children.

 

The section goes on to include  birth and childhood information about my grandma. I have several pages in this section of the album, as my grandma was a detailed memory keeper all of her life.

 

I was lucky to have a few pieces of memorabilia she had saved over the years, so I included pockets and pull-outs so it can easily be accessed. 

 

I also included photos of the entire family if I had them. In my case, I'm an only child and the official keeper of all of this so I used many originals in my album. I would normally not advise people to do this -- it's typically best to work with an archival copy and save the original elsewhere so others can have access to it. But in my case, the best and safest place for these items to be preserved is in an album.

The album continues by going back to the next generations, following the same general format. Of course, the farther back you go, the fewer pictures you're likely to have. This section includes the information I have about my 2nd great grandparents.

 

This great grandpa was a creative man and even invented a piece of farm equipment which he had patented. He didn't have the money to produce it but the patent was a point of pride for the family. He was also a gardener and talented woodworker, making chairs for many family members. A distant relative wrote two books about one branch of the Blood family, and I found many photos and stories about him in the books. All credit goes to my grandma for saving this information!

There's a family group sheet for this generation. Lewis and his wife Anna came from Maine and Indiana to settle in Iowa.

The next section details my other set of 2nd great grandparents, the Martins, my grandma's mother's family. Ironically, even though she had done a ton of family history research, my grandma hadn't done much work on her own mom's family. For instance, I have pictures of my 2nd great grandfather Willis but no pictures of my 2nd great grandmother Martha. But I recently connected with someone on Ancestry who has information about this line, so I'm hoping to learn more about her!

 

  Next we go back a generation to my 3rd great grandparents. In my grandma's records, I found a copy of this sketch or painting labeled with their names. I feel very lucky to have it!

 

I don't have much information about this couple, but I have enough to create a family listing. I've also visited the cemetery where they are buried so I included some photos of their stone.

Side note: You can find many photos of headstones from all around the world on Find-A-Grave, a free website which is easy to search. It's a great resource.

This gentleman is another 3rd great grandfather, Ira Sellars. I have no photos of his wife, Nancy, who would have been my 3rd great grandmother but I'm hopeful that there's a photo out there somewhere!

I included the information I could find about them to fill out their section of the album.

Family history is never truly DONE, as there is always something new to discover. As I finish additional generations, I can easily add what I learn to the album. In addition to this album, I have finished or almost completed three albums for my dad's father's side of the family and three for my mom's side of the family.

 

Although this has been a long and complicated project, it has been totally fascinating and worth every minute. My hope is that I've put our family history in a format which makes it easy and interesting for future generations to follow and learn a little bit more about those who came before us.

 

 

jp

Heritage Album Update

 

It's time for an update on my heritage album project!

At some point a few months ago, I felt like my mom's photos were organized enough -- and I had mapped out enough of her family tree via Ancestry -- to scrapbook her family's older photos with some confidence. So I've been making a concerted effort over the past few weeks/months to get all of her family photos into albums, and I can now say that I have accomplished that goal!

I still plan to add family trees to the albums but those trees are not quite ready for prime time yet. As I finalize them, I'll print and add them to the scrapbooks.

First, let's take a look at where this little project started -- because I know that some of you are in the same boat. After my dad passed away in 2013, I brought home ALL THE PHOTOS. Then after Grandma died the next year, I brought home nearly all of HER PHOTOS. 

This is part of what I had in front of me. Truly, it was a mess. Both sides of the family were mixed together, and nothing was in order. Only a few photos had labels. I was pretty overwhelmed, not to mention grieving the loss of my parents. I couldn't even deal with these boxes for quite some time.

I've periodically shared updates on this project as I've gone along, and you can read those posts if you'd like (search "heritage"). The first step was separating the photos by family (my dad's versus my mom's). Then I split them again into the maternal and paternal sides for each of my parents. By doing that, I could deal with only one "chunk" of photos at a time, and that seemed a lot more doable. This post goes into more detail about that process.

In addition to the photos, I had boxes of memorabilia that I hoped to add into the albums -- within reason, of course. I put a lot of that material into Life Binders. You can read more about those in this post. I can't stress how much the concept of the Life Binder helped me see my way through this project.

 

These are the tabs for my mom's life binder. As I've worked on these albums, I've pulled memorabilia from her binder to add chronologically to the albums. The binders helped give the boxes of mixed-up stuff a bit of structure -- and they helped me immediately find documents when I was ready to add them.

So now I have three relatively complete binders for my mom's side of the family. I won't lie: It hasn't always been easy. Photo identification was often a challenge. And I won't even get into the emotional component that comes with a project like this. But I am SO HAPPY I at least have this much done. It is one of the most rewarding scrapbooking projects I've completed.

These albums start with the oldest photos from Mom's side of the family and continue through her high school graduation. My parents got married the fall after she graduated, so the next album I start in this series will pick up there and move through my childhood. I'm definitely not ready to tackle that chapter yet!

 I enlisted my mom's sister to help me identify and date the photos. That helped enormously, and from there I was able to sort them by age -- basically elementary school, middle school, and high school. I tried to group photos logically within those categories, then arrange them on pages.

 I also had a few photos of my mom and her sister with their extended family. It was a great feeling when I finally could identify all of the people in these photos and even find them on my family tree! As a result of this project, I have a much, much better understanding of my family history.

 

 My mom kept a few special cards and letters over the years. I incorporated many of them into the album. I made pockets so that they can be pulled out and read easily.

 

During high school, two of my mom's best friends (twins, actually) drowned in a nearby quarry. This tragedy affected my mom profoundly throughout her life and, as a result, she was terribly afraid of water. In going through her memorabilia, I found the funeral programs for both of these girls and wrote up a small piece about them.

 I also added in Mom's report cards using small pockets so they can be removed and opened.

My mom had some great stories about detasseling corn in the summers as a high school student. I found a few photos from her detasseling crew then, in going through her box of papers, I found her pay stubs, too. It was fun to match up those photos and memorabilia and add them to the album.

 Mom kept a lot of memorabilia from her high school days, including her time playing basketball. I used her yearbooks to figure out dates for her team photos so I could add them to the album.

 

 

Mom was crowned Homecoming Queen during her senior year. I enlarged a photo to use on this page.

 

 I also included all of her senior photos. A few years after these were taken, my dad's parents had them hand-tinted for her. I learned this from a note on the back of one of the photos.

 

I also included pages for my mom's sister and her late husband, including their wedding invitation.

In the section about my grandma's family, I added a page for each of her siblings. It was such a great feeling to be able to finally know who is who in these photos and be able to create this record for posterity.

 

I know I've said this before: My mom was a woman of amazing talents but organizing her photos was not one of them! From the time I was a young girl, I've been on a mission to get her pictures organized, and this is a big step toward finishing that project. I know that my mom would have loved these albums and would be so happy that her story -- at least the first part of it -- is now recorded.

If you're in a similar photo/scrapbooking situation, take heart! I hope my posts will show you that it IS POSSIBLE to document your family's story through scrapbooks. It just takes time, diligence, and emotional fortitude. Even if no one but you cares about the albums now, your family will thank you in years to come.

Now to clean up the craft room, re-group, and keep going! I need to turn my attention back to my dad's family albums. No time to waste!

Happy scrapbooking!

jp