Category Archives: How To

Geneaquilts

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I came across this new (at least to me) way to visualize complex family trees. It looks very interesting. I’d love to put my puppies pedigrees in here to better see their relationships. All of them have at least one common ancestor in less than five generations. I’ve always wanted a way to visualize their relationships better. I think this might do it. I’m going to have to try this out soon.

Do you have any experience with Geneaquilts? Do you have any complex relationships in your family tree?

Here is a few links with more information:

Geneaquilts

Trellis Charts

Online Genealogy Newsletter

Photo Birthday Card Book – template

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lighting mom's 90th birthday cake

lighting the birthday cake

Remember last week’s book of the week, “face BOOK“? Well it inspired me to take photos at my mom’s 90th birthday with the plan to put together a birthday card in the form of a book very much like “face Book”. I set up a spot at the party to take photos of all the guests. I brought a notebook for the guest to write a short message with a marker. I’ve set up a template for the book and now I just need to drop the photos in place. It is going to be a wonderful memento of my mom’s 90th birthday party.

If you would like the InDesign template for a 7×7 blurb book you can download it from my dropbox for personal use. These are fully editable templates from InDesign CS6. You can change the colors and text as you would like.

Celebrating Nine Decades Pages Template

Celebrating Nine Decades Cover Template

I’ll post a preview of the finished book soon.

Related articles

Using Lightroom 4 to Create Your Photo Books – Blurb webinar

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blurb

Blurb is having a free webinar next Thursday, February 28th called “Using Lightroom 4 to Create Your Photo Books”. This sounds really interesting I think I’ll be attending. Here is what Blurb has to say about it:

One of our favorite Adobe® Lightroom® 4 experts, professional photographer Jay Graham, will be illustrating exactly how to create a stunning photo book in Lightroom 4 with the new Book module that works right with Blurb. He’ll cover:

  • Collecting and managing your photos
  • Sequencing your work
  • Using auto layout
  • Setting preferences
  • Book design and captioning

By the end of the session, you’ll be ready to put together your own beautiful photo book.

Oh, and you’ll even learn how to get 25% off your next Blurb book. We’re excited to be able to share this webinar with you and can’t wait for the next ones.

February 28th, 2013 10:00 – 11:00 a.m. PST – Register Now

Mary Text – Next Revision

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Today I reread Brandy’s posts on Storytelling for Genealogist with the Mary book in mind. While it didn’t inspire me to take a whole new approach to the text it did help me to approach it a bit differently. I had been unsure about how to start the narrative off and Brandy’s advice on conflict and cost gave me better focus on what to do. I think the flow of the story is much improved. Plus I was able to improve the ending by comparing the beginning status to the end of the story. That was another great suggestion Brandy had in her third post in the series.

Another thing I came to better understand from Brandy’s series is that while my mom is very good at editing for spelling, punctuation etc., she isn’t able to help me with content editing. I was beginning to realize this but I didn’t know how to articulate what the challenge was. I also like Brandy’s hint to read it out loud. I was hoping to get my edits typed up today but I didn’t make it. But I should be able to get them done tomorrow and posted. Then I’m going to find someone to read it out loud so I can see how it sounds.

 

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I’m really enjoying Brandy’s series of storytelling with family history in mind. I can’t wait to really dig in and apply what she is teaching us here. There is so much here that I’ve not really thought through in the way I need to and want to in my own storytelling attempts. Thanks again Brandy for sharing your expertise.

 

Genealogy vs Story Telling

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There is so much great information out there and the main goal of my blog is to bring together in one place all the information you need to put together a great family story project. Though it is a task that will take a lifetime, I haven’t been doing enough of gathering these resources but I’m going to make sure that at least once each week I link you to a blog or other website with great information to help you tell your family’s tales. This post by Brandy is right on track. To really share you family stories you must have more than dates and other facts, story telling is the key. I’ll be watching Brandy’s series closely.

Europe 1952 – InDesign Template

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Europe 1952 Cover

I thought I would make a template of this project available for you to download. I’m using Dropbox and I’m relatively new to it so I hope it works as desired. If you’ve not used an Adobe InDesign template before it is very easy. Just open the template as you would any document and then you can add pages and drag the desired master page for chapter headings and newspaper articles. You can customize it anyway you would like. If you want to edit the original template than you should make sure you open the original file. Think of the template as a starting place. This template is sized for a large landscape book on Blurb.com. To publish your finished book on blurb, download the pdf presets and export. Then upload the pdf to blurb and order you finished book. The cover template is for an image wrap book with 440 pages. So if your book is shorter you will need to make adjustments.

To download the files, click on the links below. One the page loads up it will look like gibberish, but don’t worry. Right click on the page and select “save page as” and save to your computer. Then you will be able to open the document in Adobe InDesign. (Sorry it has taken me all week to get this figured out)

Pages Template

Cover Template

This post concludes my Europe 1952 project. If you have questions that I haven’t covered let me know and I’ll do what I can to answer them, possible with an extra post. It has been a fun journey over the last few months.

Europe 1952 – Adding Memorabilia

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One of the great things about doing this project was all the stuff that I had to work with. One of the challenging things about this project was all the stuff I had to work with. My mom is a saver and I think she saved everything she got on this trip. I have no idea how she got it all home. She didn’t have that much luggage. Even though sometimes it was a pain to figure out how to include most of the documents, brochures etc. that she saved, it adds to the flavor and the interest of the book. Some of the things I had to work with were:

How I dealt with the above items I covered in earlier posts. Follow the links above.

  • Documents

Some where scanned and others were transcribed and reformatted to fit the page.

  • Brochures
  • Maps
  • Menus
  • Letters
  • Business Cards
  • Receipts

I scanned these and cropped them to size before placing them in the document.

  • Postcards
  • Ticket Stubs

Some of the postcards and tickets stubs had interesting edges that I didn’t want to crop off. So after scanning I opened them in Adobe Photoshop, deleted the background so that it was transparent. Then when placed in the document the deckled or torn edges were preserved.

  • Booklets
  • Books
  • Medallions

Since these items were thicker I wanted to keep the dimension. So I also opened these images in Adobe Photoshop and deleted the background to make it transparent. I really like how you can tell they are books and not just a single sheet of paper. It was fun to have the medallion that my mom got from visiting the Pope. This same process works great for objects of any shape.

When placing the memorabilia on the page it is usually good to gather them near each other on the page and not spread them out across the page. Overlapping another piece of memorabilia or a photo can also help. The overlapping visually connects the items together and brings some order to a layout that might otherwise get too busy.