by Carolyn Steele Agosta

Created on: October 15, 2009   Last Updated: October 17, 2009

A few years ago, after our parents passed away, my sisters and I decided to create a family history scrapbook. We realized that future generations wouldn't know anything about our past unless we began collecting and saving it now. Indeed, we should have started sooner. If you are interested in preserving the past for your descendents, here's how:

1. Gather information. We started with what we had - family stories, a list of relatives that my Grandma drew up a long time ago, old photographs and documents. We organized these and then began to fill in the blanks by contacting other relatives and going online. Some good sites are http://www.ancestry.com/ and

http://www.FamilySearch.org. Also do a Google search of your last name. We found a wealth of information that way.

2. Organize your information. Creative Memories, http://www.CreativeMemories.com, offers great Family Tree pages for scrapbooking. These can provide a starting point and there are many family tree worksheets available online. We made up a list of photographs and documents for each branch of the tree, so that we knew what we had to work with.

3. Plan your book. Scrapbooks generally have 15 to 20 sheets, and you can use both sides, which gives you 30 to 40 pages. Before you begin pasting anything down, plan how many pages you're going to give to each subject. We organized our into double-page layouts, devoting certain pages to certain ancestors.

4. Decide on your photos. Some of the photographs, if they're quite old, may have damage such as creases, spots, etc. Nowadays it's easy to make new copies of these photos that retain all the old-fashioned charm without the dings and bruises. We used black scrapbook paper to give an impression of old-time photograph albums.

5. Documents - we had some old letters, newspaper clippings, and even a copy of our Great-great-grandfather's Civil War enlistment papers. These items were so fragile that we decided NOT to put them into the album, even if mounted on archive-quality paper, but instead scanned them onto scrapbooking paper that looked appropriately aged, and preserved the original documents separately. In some cases, we reduced the size of the documents so that they'd fit on the scrapbook pages better; small enough to allow room for photos, large enough to still be able to read them.

6. Share the work if you can - turn it into a family project. We had a lot of fun sharing ideas on this and it can be a real bonding experience for siblings, parents &

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>