And when it comes to researching and building our family tree and collecting important documents about people who have been special to us, we naturally look for a way to show it off. And so we turn to scrapbooking. By putting all those important pieces of family history into a scrapbook format we are constructing a document that could be of immense interest to our children and to our children's children. And of course all that hard work and tireless research will need to be stored in a safe place to protect it from loss.
How do we get going? If you take a look at About.com (scrapbooking) you will find the stories of dozens of people for whom scrapbooking has become a source of pleasure and joy, and who continue to be grateful for all the pleasure and social contact it has brought them. First of all select a scrapbook that is going to be strong, serviceable and large enough to contain the amount of data and images that you expect to put into it. You will probably be well advised to acquire one to which pages can be quickly and easily added at a later date.
Before you begin you need to decide on the structure of your scrapbook. You have three main choices. You might like to start with your father's side, and work all the way down from the oldest generation to the youngest generation on that side of the family, and then carry on with the same procedure for the mother's side Or you could decide to start with your mother's side and repeat the process down to the present generation. Or again, if you have a large amount of material to process overall you might well decide to start one scrapbook for the bloodline and another scrapbook for the distaff side.
When you have decided how you are going to organize your scrapbook(s) gather together all the documents, images, memorabilia, awards, citations, certificates, condolence cards and letters and anything else you are planning to incorporate. Some of these items, such as medals and certain types of memorabilia, will not be suitable to place directly into a scrapbook, but will need to be stored somewhere else, with a clear reference to their significance In the text and their location in an appropriate storage medium.
After you have set up a title page the next page could feature an attractively presented chart of the oldest generation for whom you have records. This is where a member of the family might be encouraged to use their artistic skills and get involved in the whole creative process, and maybe help a younger family member to identify with and place even greater value on this whole endeavor.
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