Help requested

Hi Marilyn,

When I have scrapped pages like this I have focussed on large headings with fancy and bold coloured lettering. Also, including a hand-written paragraph about the person the page is about or the house is a nice addition.

Using paper that looks like it has old handwritting on it makes a nice background. Old stamps are good to fill up space too (you can buy these from the post offices and are inexpensive).

Hope this helps!

Laura

Marilyn wrote:

Thanks for your input Laura...some great ideas to work with :o) I am currently browsing through websites for perhaps some historical facts regarding employment, living conditions, mobility, relating to the time. No success so far but I will keep looking. I am not too sure where all this will lead but I have lots of the certificates relating to the people I have searched out so far. I thought that I could include some/or all of those for people to read + census info that shows the movements of ancestors for work, their occupations, etc. Just beginning this so it will take some planning I think.

Marilyn, I did a page for my grandmothers sister (though I did have a picture) I scanned their wedding certificate and printed a miniature on cardstock for the page. I would think a map of the area they lived, possibly a mini copy of census data, and any certificates with their names as the title and relationship. A picture of the church or town they lived in. For my husband's great-grandfather I used a postcard of the Houston area and one of Galveston that I got off ebay as we have no photo of him and he lived in that area. I was lucky enough to get ones from the time frame he was alive. Please do share when you get some done. I am also always looking for heritage ideas. Sandy

Do you have family stories, Marilyn?

I did an album for one branch of my ancestry where I had family stories from my dad & a couple of older cousins (dad's generation). While I did have some family pics to go along with the stories, you could substitute pics of objects that relate to the story that might be similar to what your ancestors would've used/experienced (a story about Grandma churning butter could be accompanied by a pic [found online or scanned from a book] of a butter churn similar to the one she would've used. Maps of where they lived are good, too.

Here's what I did, if you're interested:

I also used photos of family heirlooms. The image used in the lettering of the cover & as the background behind the pages is a photo of a painting done of the family farmhouse. I hit a goldmine when a cousin of my dad's shared a journal that my great aunt (who I remember; she died when I was 10) of a cruise she took to the Mediterranean in 1928. I learned a lot about her that I hadn't known by reading her journal. I scanned a couple of pages from it & transcribed the rest (her writing was difficult to read) & arranged it with the background being scans from the (original!) map (came with the journal). Of course, there were no photos from her trip, so I scoured the web for images that complemented her story. Even found someone who knew something about the ship she was on & was able to tell me that she had traveled first class, based on her comment that she was seated at the table with the ship's doctor (her profession was nursing).

If people you do have photos of were named after someone from an older generation, you could use the photo & then tell a story about the person they were named after.

(You may notice that other than "Pattison" I don't use last names in the images I posted. This is just in the web version. The print version, done for the family, has full names.)

Good luck! Let me know what you come up with as you work on your project.

Are your ancestors Scottish? If so, mind if I ask what part of the country? My Scottish ancestors were from Paisley, Renfrewshire, near Glasgow.

After my dad's visit in December & January, I'd love to compare genealogy notes with you & maybe we can help each other find pics & historical info.

Alicia

Thanks for your input Sandy, it is always great to hear how others would approach this kind of project. So far I have only researched my own family and have a few photos of my parents and one of my paternal grandmother....that is it! I have managed to find some info online about the Royal Navy ship my paternal GF served on WW1 and there are some old postcards available from the same time. I am also waiting for some info to come from a Liverpool genealogy forum...someone has offered to lookup certs for me at the LRO. On my mum's family I am awaiting a copy of my ggf's birth certificate to confirm my next stage research. If I have got things right, would you believe that my gggf died at the bottom of our road!!

I will tackle DH's in time but I need to pick his brains first...LOL I do have a few photos of DH's family which were among my MIL's effects.

Sadly there is no one I have a relationship with to provide family stories Alicia. While I was growing up there was never any discussion...particularly in front of the children :o) I have learnt more about my family through doing this research than was ever talked about. It has thrown up lots of surprises and is very interesting....LOL

I am now in the process of trying to gleen information from history sites and I know that one particular couple moved from Aberdeen to Leith area. This mobility was due to industrialisation. The family worked mostly in the flax industry in Aberdeen. They are a family that seem to have been dogged with disaster. Living in Aberdeen they had their first three children all die, prem baby @ 16 hours, one at 26 days and another at 2 years, five months. After moving to Leith they lost 2 boys in what looks like the same incident, one 5 and one 9, both had fractured skulls and the older one had a deep chest laceration. Sounds like some kind of accident but as yet I have not found anything in Newspaper archives. Then they had a 16 year old drown in a swimming accident

I have found some old pictures that could help to tell a story of the sort of lives they led and I have found a site that has lots of old pictures of Leith. I am sure that a visit to the local library would provide stuff that could be photocopied and used with credit given to the source.

Regarding my Scottish ancestors...they all appear to east coasters, unlike yours which hail from the west. Some of my husband's family where born in the west, although they apparently came to the mainland from Ireland. We shall see if that turns out to be the case :o)

I may not be able to help, but I did find the narrative about that part of your family intriguing. I think it would be interesting to learn more about my family back in Belgium, but it's not that easy to do.

M-C

Tell me about it M-C....so far I am back 7 generations on one line to 1794 but the early 1800's with the rest. I have spent roughly £150 so far and downloadable certificates are only available back to 1855...then you are into Old Parish Records. ScotlandsPeople costs £6 for 30 viewing credits and each search cost 1 credit to view and 5 credits for each certificate you view...so you 30 credits don't last long and the don't do subscriptions. Along with that I have a monthly sub on Ancestry.co.uk which costs £9.95 and that has been running for 2 months now.

Not sure how you would approach your research for your Belgian ancestors. I have been lucky as there is a Liverpool Genealogy forum and my paternal GF was Liverpool born.....his father born to Welsh parents who moved to Liverpool. After finding the scottish marriage certificate I just asked for help on that forum and voila.....I had loads of info in an afternoon, with references, and one kind person is going to check a marriage certificate for me this week as it is so easy to go down a blind alley. Have you tried

which is international....or is another popular one. It may get you a started but beware of another obsessive pastime. I am know toying with the idea that the altered tin I made may suit a genealogy project better than an actual album when there is no photos. I am thinking a small album and maybe decorated file folders to hold each families certificates.

I think it would be interesting to learn more about

Try here

or here Hugz, Marilyn

See if you can find their wedding certificates, birth records, baptismal records, naturalization records or ship manefests, pictures of the ships, even cliping from the city directories or phone books and death certificates and obituaries, Map their journey as they moved from one location to another. In my album I have scraped copies of all of the above,. I do not scrape the original unless I can replace it. Like I have a photo copy of the naturalization paper from the library. I shrunk it to fit in the album so I used it but the wedding certificate I made a copy of and kept the original in my safe deposit box. The certificate is huge and would have had to been folded so I photo copied it on good qualuty paper but shunk to fit a 12X12

Reread your last paragraph, Marilyn. Flesh that out a little & you've told a story of your family history.

And some of my Scots migrated to Ireland for a few generations before heading further west to the U.S.

Alicia

Thanks, Marilyn. Bookmarked their site

Hadn't seen it before. Need to get back to my genealogy research. Too many projects, too little time.

I do have one advantage. My grandparents were cousins (not first cousins), so once I get back a number of generations, one line counts for two.

Alicia

This one also seem to have a great reputation and you can ask for lookups. Searching on can get pretty expensive and there is a thread on this forum that explains how to maximise your searches for least money: I had spent lotss of money searching before I came across this thread. This is where I learned everything regarding the family I wrote about. You may want to make a bookmark that also :o)

Found a bunch of old postcards (cool that you can post images there!) of Kirkcudbright, where some of my family's from. Need to browse more when I have my cousin's genealogy handy & can look up names & dates. An addictive hobby, is genealogy (like scrapbooking ).

Alicia