Ideas for Family History book for my children


classylady
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I have this nebulous idea in my mind about a Christmas present for all my children. I'm thinking of buying binders and putting inside it our family tree, group sheets, our courtship story, stories of ancestors, journal entries from grandparents, etc.  Do any of you know good websites I can go to where I can download free digital family trees or family group sheets, etc.?  I guess I could also go to the Church's Distribution Center or Deseret Book to see what they have. Any other ideas?

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Wonderful gift idea!

For picts, stories, etc of those that have passed, I would put all of that on familysearch where everyone can access it as needed.  This would mean they could download picts to resize for wall portraits or for school projects without being nervous they would ruin the original.  It would also preserve all of that in case of fire, flood, etc.

I would use the binder idea for picts/stories of those that are still living since that wouldn't be accessible to everyone.

 

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The pictures and stories of my deceased ancestors are already on FamilySearch. But, my children and young grandchildren don't get online to look at the info.  I'm thinking of something similar to a Book of Remembrance, but I want to use regular sized binders and paper, not the large rectangular size of Book of Remembrance that I had (and still do) as a young girl.

And, to tell the truth, I don't particularly like FamilySearch. Some days it takes forever to log in and bring up the info I'm trying to look at.  It often freezes and kicks me out. I will be getting a lot of the information off Family Search, but my grandchildren are too young to navigate it. My adult children haven't had the interest and I'm hoping this will help "turn their hearts to the fathers". 

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Familysearch can print your family tree and family group sheets.  I'm not sure about the stories - I haven't tried doing that before.

My nephew spent an entire year in the Philippines and he took a slew of photos he took while he was there.  He then went to this website and created a photo book out of all of it.  He also spent a few weeks in other places taking photos as he goes and made photo books out of each trip.  The one he took from the Philippines had a lot of text in it and he used Blurb to design it and put it together.  The other books are all gallery style photo pages without any captioning at all and he used something else for it.  I can't remember the name... Shutterfly maybe?

When I saw my nephew's photo book for his Philippine trip, I was so moved by it.  It was like a family journal where he had candid photos of things from my family to some goat in the middle of the street in my hometown and he wrote something about all those things.  I bought another copy of the photo book so I can give it to our family patriarch to put in the family vault.

Maybe you can do something like that too... either copy and paste text to Blurb with some pictures, or take screen shots of family search pages and such to put into the photo book.  Then you can order as many copies of the book as you want to give out and optionally allow other people in your family to buy the book for themselves from the Blurb (or similar) site.

 

 

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So my previous idea was a bust - perhaps this?:

Speaking as one who's been given a lot of copies of charts, pedigrees, stories, etc over the years, I suggest something along the lines of what Anatess mentioned.  Maybe start a 'family stories book series' and focus on a different person/couple/family line each year. It doesn't have to be very big either and you could pair it with something about that person (ie garden seeds because grandma smith loved gardening) which would personalize it a bit more.

PS - re: familysearch - try a different browser (chrome or firefox - not explorer) or a different day other than Sunday 

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