Hexies look nice. Question on photo and documents, if I remember correctly you are also making an electronic scrapbook, are you using a program or a make by you program?

Jo

Midkid5 said:

if I remember correctly you are also making an electronic scrapbook, are you using a program or a make by you program?

Hiya, Jo.

Yes, I have also dabbled in digital scrapbooking.  I use Photoshop Elements (current version) to make the digital pages.  I belong to one main organization (NAODS - National Association of Digital Scrapbookers) that I take lessons from the founder to learn various different techniques.  She and her instructors are excellent.  I highly recommend this group.   As with any software, there are lots and lots of things you can do .. or elect not to .. and I've barely scratched the surface.   Another excellent instructor is Jessica Sprague.  Although she does have paid courses, I've only been doing her freebie ones (she also has a FB page).

Currently, I am still doing physical scrapbooks because I have physical, heritage photos and newspaper articles.  One purpose of the physical scrapbooks was to have a place to properly store *and* display those photos.  To be sure, I've scanned them, so that I have a digital back-up but the real pictures are put into the scrapbooks.

Once I get to the year 2000, I'll switch to digital scrapbooking, as that's when we got our first digital camera and no longer printed out physical photos.  Of course, i can always *print* digital photos to get a physical print, but digital scrapbooks take up less space on my bookcase. :-)

Thanks for explaining about your scrap booking.  I was wondering if you gave the finished scrap book to the person/family it went with or kept it for yourself or made a copy for yourself.  Are all of your scrap books online and able to be viewed by all members of the family?  Sure hope they all appreciate all of the work you are going through.  How many books have you completed so far?

WARNING!!   this is a LONG post.  Ignore it should you not have the time or inclination.  :-)

The physical scrapbooks are for *me*.  There is only one copy of it.  I don't love ANYONE enough to make more physical copies!   When I finished my mother's line, I had 3 volumes of 12x12 pages.  I have 2 adult cousins who are within a "road trip" distance (I'm in the middle of California (near San Francisco) .. one cousin is in the extreme northern end of California and the other cousin is in Vancouver, WA).  Mr. Pirate & I did a road trip to visit these 2 cousins so they could look at the physical albums.  (I have another cousin in this family line but he lives in Illinois and we're not making a trip there .. he got an online link.)

However, I did specifically buy a wide format scanner so that I can scan the 12x12 pages before I put them in their protective sleeves.  I upload the scanned pages (once the entire album is completed) to Flickr and give the link to that album to the proper family members.  (Such as ... if it's my family line, the nieces/nephews on my husband's side don't get the link because it's not their family and they don't know the people involved.)

There are other photo sharing sites and I've looked at them in the past but for various reasons, Flickr appears to do the job.  The other sites had restrictions that didn't do what I wanted.  I've also looked into the possibility of printing out those scanned 12x12 pages to make a printed book for whoever would like a physical copy of their own, but none of those book-making sites will simply take my scanned image and print it as-is.  They all want me to put my photos into their pre-planned templates and that is NOT what I want nor need.  So, I'm still looking for an online company to do that.  But since no one has ever said that they'd like a copy for themselves, it's not crucial.

As for appreciation ... I'm not sure, honestly.  The cousins that I made the road trip for seemed marginally interested .. and the book was about our common grandparents and the children (who would have been my cousins' parents!).  I will admit was I a bit disappointed in their non-reaction, but then again, I'm not specifically doing this for them .. it's mainly for *me* and to protect the vintage photos.  Even my own girls aren't terribly interested.  Granted two of them live out of state but they certainly got the online links.  However, they didn't comment on the photos.  Sigh.  Maybe when I'm dead and they can look through the albums, they'll have a better appreciation for the information that I've researched.   On the other hand, only my oldest girl is married and she's not having kids.  The middle girl doesn't have a boyfriend, so there's no marriage prospects in the future.  The youngest has a boyfriend but I have no idea if that relationship is "serious" or not.  Again, no wedding bells in the future.  Bottom line: there's no grandchildren to pass these albums along to, which does make me sad.  I did have a passing, despondent thought along the lines of "why am I even doing this?" but the answer has always been "because *I* like doing this and I want to protect these photos".   On the other, other hand, at least one of my nieces has told me that *she* is interested in the physical albums if my girls don't want them and this niece has children ... soooooooo ... the potential to pass them along to the next generation exists.

My M.O has been to start each family line (my grandparents (maternal, paternal) and my husband's grandparents (maternal, paternal) as far back as I can reasonably verify.  Sometimes that's pretty far back, other times, it's within memory.  So, that's four different family lines as the basis.  I continue each line down through the generations, adding every single vintage photo that I have (and I do use the originals, mounted conservatively and non-destructively) and information that I've researched.  Sometimes I have personal information from family stories or newspaper articles of the time.  Sometimes I have just general information about the time & place.  (For example, one of Mr. Pirate's ancestors fought in the Civil War under General William Tecumsah Sherman on his March through Georgia.  I was able to get a list of the campaigns that this ancestor probably fought in, given his dates of enlistment but I don't have any specific information.)    I try to be as complete and accurate as I can be with the direct line ancestors.  I do mention the siblings of direct line ancestors and give a *brief* synopsis of their life and children but that's it for those sidelines.  I could certainly research all those siblings and children of siblings, but I would quickly get far off the track.  And practically speaking, those sidelines have no bearing at all on my or my husband's direct line.

When I get to the grandparent generation, my "rule" has been to start a new physical album when that ancestor gets married and starts their own family.  I do this mainly because I start to have more and more photos as the timeline gets more modern.  I can't physically fit all the photos, newspaper articles & information into one album, so it seemed reasonable to break up the family line into family units.  I've completed 7 albums so far.  My Mom's albums end at the point where she marries my Dad.  My Dad's albums end when *his* Dad marries my grandmother .. because I have a lot of information about my Dad's family and I expect it will generate several albums.  My paternal grandfather's album will end when my Dad marries my Mom ... because now there is a new family unit (my birth family).  I have LOTS of photos and information for this unit. :-)

Same with my husband's lines ... I've stopped the albums at a point where some direct ancestor gets married and starts his/her own family unit.  Typically, it's when I know have a LOT of photos, etc to scrapbook.  So, I break the albums up into manageable units.

To make it less intimidating for me, I've started with the family lines that I (thought) I had the least information about .. figuring I could get my feet wet with this scrapbooking thing with limited photos.  Well, it turned out that even these paltry lines were substantial due the extra research I did on tangential subjects.  :-)    I've now completed all those lines for which I didn't have a lot of information (SO I THOUGHT!).  To my surprise, they turned out to be heftier than I ever thought.  :-)

I am now at the point where I am poised to do my parent's album (that's my 500 lb gorilla album).  That's intimidating, so I'm holding off on that.  I just finished my hu

Thank you very much for all the information.  I have been scanning family photos off n on for the last few years.  My mom has the photos and they are in no order what so ever...old photos early 1900 thru 1990 all thrown together in old plastic bread bags.  I started organizing n scanning then mom decided to put away and undid the organizing.

At some point someone took the old pictures out of the old black page albums, there had been info written under the pictures...lost.

Thanks again for info.

Jo

Midkid5 said:

At some point someone took the old pictures out of the old black page albums, there had been info written under the pictures...lost.

aaaaarrrrrrrggggghhhhhh!!!!   ::banging head on the wall::

You may have thought it lengthy, but I found it interesting.  What a lot of work, b ut it sounds like something you enjoy.  A labor of love.  

I wouldn't worry about your girls not being interested right now--they are young.  Give them time.  When my folks talked about "the old days" I wasn't all that interested and now that they are gone, I wish I would have paid more attention and documented things.  (like my dad walking around the Enola Gay a few days before she took off on the biggest mission of WWII.)  It saddens me that I missed so much by not showing interest, so years down the road when the girls have matured more--they will appreciate it.  

A while back 2 of my kids and I really got into our ancestry.  I already had a lot of documentation on my dad's side but got even further with Ancestry.com.  Legend carried down on dad's side is that we are descendants of Martin Luther (the reformer of the 1500s --not King!) . Not documented, but would be fun to do more research.  Now you have me interested in getting back in to it.

Where in Illinois does your cousin live?   

latterberry said:

I already had a lot of documentation on my dad's side but got even further with Ancestry.com.  ...  Now you have me interested in getting back in to it.

It's absolutely AMAZING what you can find on Ancestry!  I made a false assumption early on, when I was first researching, years ago.  I found a lot of official documentation and was thrilled to find them.  I thought that was all there was.  Fast forward to current times .... I didn't realize (although I should have) that Ancestry is *constantly* adding new items, as they are digitized.  On a lark, I did some more searching.  Lo and behold .. HOLY MOLEY! .. there were more official documents!  i was over the moon.  Now, I log back into Ancestry just to see if anything new is there.

Also, get yourself a trial subscription to Newspapers.com   It's a REAL eye-opener.  I was researching one of Mr. Pirate's lines when they lived in Kansas (Coffey and Osborne county) in the late 1880s.  These were just regular people: no special offices held,  no special recognitions.  But .. geez, Louise!   Those regional newspapers were just like little old biddies.  They reported EVERYTHING.  EVERY article was a sentence.   A person broke a hand.  A barn burned down.  Won a prize at a local contest.  Hosted a party.  Took a trip to see relatives.     It was darn near if you sneezed, it was reported.

BUT .. the upside was that I found a large number of references to Mr. Pirate's family members over a series of years.  One sibling relation took a box of Kansas dirt to the Illinois State Fair because Kansas dirt was so special.  I kid you not.   

So, I "clipped" those articles, saving the newspaper name and date and printed them out.  It was a fascinating addition to the scrapbook.

Once that family moved to California (San Bernardino county), the newspaper references became less but that could be because there were more real stories to report on  or they lived in a REALLY rural area, far outside of town.  I don't know.   But in any case, it is amazing what was reported.

One extremely interesting story involved a sister of Mr. Pirate's maternal grandmother.  The family story was that this sister committed suicide.  Very hush, hush, as you can imagine, as this was in 1908.  But, you gotta take family stories with a grain of salt, especially if they've been carried down over decades.  Well, doing a blanket research for the surname in a particular city, I found *2* very long articles about this woman.  !!!!    She was only 17 when she died, so *why* on earth would she have warranted two separate articles in a large circulation newspaper?   Well, it turned out that she was obsessed with gambling in the Chinese gambling halls.  Her young husband objected.  On Thanksgiving Day, 1908, he hauled her out of a gambling den and berated her (probably not the first time).  There was (another) huge argument.  She stomped out of the room in high dudgeon.  Some time later, the husband heard loud groans from the other room.  Entering, he found his young wife, writhing in agony on the floor.  Apparently, in an effort to "show him", she **swallowed some carbolic acid**.    Yeah, real smart.  She didn't make it.   So, in this case, the family story was absolutely true, much to my astonishment and to the astonishment of another family member who originally gave me the suicide reference.  I never would have known that story if it hadn't been for Newspapers.com.

I did 7 day trial run and went full tilt during that time, searching for anyone in all of my family lines and clipping/saving/printing the references.  All grist for my scrapbooking mill.  :-)

Where in Illinois does your cousin live?   

In Northbrook, IL.

Our DD has been using Ancestry.com and she found the ancestor that verified a bit of oral history that my DH's father had passed along.

Supposedly, according to DH's father, his many times great-granddaddy was kicked out of Scotland for being a horse thief. I always took that tale of my father-in-law's with a grain of salt because I thought a man would be hung for being a horse thief back in the old days.

Lo and behold, DD found on Ancestry.com one Thomas (of the family line) who was transported to the Carolinas in 1720 something for horse thievery.  Name of the ship, name of the man he was "bound to" for indentured servitude, etc. etc.

DH was tickled pink to learn that the story is based in fact.

My mother's mother died when I was sixteen and we drove home from New York to Indiana for her funeral. My mom was naturally quite upset over her mother's death but she became even more distraught when she picked up her mother's very old Bible and saw that it was empty of all the newspaper clippings my grandmother had saved over the decades.  All of the family obituaries she had lovingly clipping out of all the local newspapers were gone. 

My grandfather had gone through the Bible and thrown them away because they were all yellow and brittle.  It was the first time I had ever seen my mother shout at her father. My dad had to take her out of the house ...