28th
04 -
2011
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If you’ve been around the genealogy world for a while, you may have noticed how family tree scrapbooking is the next, new level beyond simply piecing together the standard family diagram. After investing the time and money to pull together all the necessary documents to verify your results with confidence, now what? Well, people are having a field day with family tree scrapbooking. And there are all sorts of creative ways people have gone about presenting the material in a safe format without concern that they’ll be lost or damaged.
Whether or not you’ve done any scrapbooks in the past, you’ll find family tree scrapbooking to be pretty straightforward. If you start out with a binder or portfolio of good quality you’ll be happier long term. Another thing to consider is how you may want to have room to expand over time. With some you can simply add pages. It’s best to be able to insert pages throughout, just in case you need to add something along the way that you forgot or later found. With family tree scrapbooking, you just never know when you’ll locate a special item that you want to catalogue.
Now, before you actually begin the family tree scrapbooking process, it’s really important to stop and think about how you want your pages laid out in the book. Sometimes you can get a better idea by setting out all of your papers, awards, memoirs, pictures, and documents first. You can generally get an idea of how you want things arranged via this dry run. Organize everything in a meaningful way before you commit it to the scrapbook.
Family tree scrapbooking also provides some wonderful “quality control” benefits. See, when you’ve laid out the results of all your research, it gives you a chance to see what all you’ve come up with, in one fell swoop. In the process, you’ll likely want to label every page. As you do so, you may realize, for example, that you don’t have this person’s full name, or that lady’s maiden name.
Additionally, you’ll come up with other things you’d like to know. And as you add entries such as place of marriage, it can quickly help you see what’s missing. This gives you a concrete way, like a checklist, to recognize and remedy missing data before your sources pass away! You can simply go back and get this information. And this leads me to another key reason for family tree scrapbooking. You are going to come up with information that really doesn’t have a way of being documented. But the scrapbook will at least give you a place and a way to write it down so it’s not forgotten. In fact, you could just include your own notes, which itself is a neat way for documenting the process you went through to create the masterpiece.
My final piece of family tree scrapbooking advice has to do with the fact that the project can grow very rapidly. Just realize that simply stepping up to consider your own parents sends you down two entirely different channels. There’s a big decision point as to whether you want to run down one side of the family until complete or not. Alternately, for family tree scrapbooking purposes, you may choose to go chronological, incorporating both sides of the family as you go. I know it can seem odd to create an intentional family “schism” and just follow one side through to completion when doing a family tree, but handling both sides simultaneously can be taxing. Either way, just keep good records and you’ll do fine.
26th
04 -
2011
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If you want to create your family tree, but do not know where to start, family tree templates can get you started on your genealogical adventure. By giving you a pre-designed family tree that you can fill in, you can easily assemble your chart of lineage and, while doing so, learn the proper format for family trees.
Family tree templates take the form of blank family trees that can be populated with the names of the people in your immediate and extended family. Often, these templates will include instructions that will explain how to fill in each rectangle with whose name and with what information. All you need to do is follow the directions and with family tree templates, you can have an impressive chart of your familial relationships in no time.
By providing you with instructions, format, and explanations of what everything means family tree templates can help you learn how family trees are made, assembled, and organized. Thus, if you want to continue your exploration of genealogy, you will have that much more understanding of what a family tree is, how it works, and how you can start building your own from scratch, if you so desire. Or you can simply use more family tree templates when you want to expand your genealogy beyond the scope of your current template. Some templates are even designed to be easily added onto previous templates, making it that much easier to expand your family tree into more and more distant relations.
Family tree templates can be easily found and are usually fairly inexpensive. Book stores and some office supply stores usually carry them, and there are more than a few web sites that sell genealogy supplies, including family tree templates. With just a little bit of searching, you can start your adventure into your ancestry with these easy to use aids that will ensure you are doing everything correctly.
If you want to learn more about yourself by learning about your ancestors, your investigations will be much easier to organize and understand with a family tree. And if you want a little help when you first start building a family tree, family tree templates can give you the boost you need. Easy to find, easy to use, and easy to understand, they are an invaluable tool for the beginning genealogist who wants to see just how deep and how broad a family tree can become.
24th
04 -
2011
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You may think you know what genealogy is, but many individuals confuse it with the closely related term “family history.” Genealogy is the study of ancestry and descendants. The study of genealogy pertains only to who is a member of a specific family and who these family members are related to.
Family history, though, is the actual narrative of your ancestors’ lives. It is also the act of tracking the dates of your ancestors’ births and deaths, the jobs they held, as well as any other important factors in their lives.
As you make your family’s genealogy chart, it’ll be difficult to separate the two. After all, in order to learn who came from where, you’ll have to learn a little more about their history as well.
Who, what, when, where and how of your family tree is often conveniently labeled genealogy. Keep in mind, however, that an occasional relative who likes to take words literally may correct you when you talk about genealogy in such broad terms.
Why does genealogy matter any way?
Perhaps today it doesn’t matter as much as it once did. Especially in this country where – according to legend and tradition – every person at birth gets to start fresh in America. He stands or falls on his own merits, without regard to his family status.
Historically speaking, genealogy was an essential study. After all, it was the method of determining inheritance – especially with the nobility. Imagine the need to discover the next heir in line to a throne if the king had no direct son or daughter to pass his rule down to. The compilation of detailed and accurate genealogical records was of the essence to ensure the proper individuals received the throne.
As you can expect, even with the utmost care, many times in history more than one genealogical record would suddenly appear….throwing the process of crowning the next heir into bedlam.
Genealogy even pops up in the Bible. In the New Testament book of Matthew, he spends pages on what many Sunday school students try to quickly gloss over, “the begats.” “Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob” and so it went until you get to – some forty-two generations later – “And Jacob begat Joseph the husband of Mary of whom was born Jesus…”
Genealogy plays an important role in the lives of many families today, even when no royalty is involved. The study of this timeless pursuit can help play a decisive role in bringing families torn apart by circumstances beyond their control back together. In the decades immediately following World War II, families found genealogy instrumental in tracing members displaced by the many tragic facets of the war.
There are other reasons families get separated, as well. Consider famines, where some members must flee the country in order to survive. A mother may move away with her children in order to keep them alive. Or perhaps, as in the events leading up to World War II (and beyond), members of families leave in order to save children or the elderly from undue social persecution…or assured death.
In these cases, genealogy plays a major role in making fractured families whole again…even if the current family members didn’t know that they had members missing. Thirty some years ago, a novel based on a stunningly simple idea of genealogy gave many African-Americans a new common ancestor, Kunte Kinte, the main character of Alex Haley’s book Roots.
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