Heritage Scrapbooking for Everyone

The best place to start when trying to interest kids in their family history is with them. There is a wonderful website you can use to bring history to life one generation at a time. I'll use our birth years and the price of a new car to give you an idea:

Check it out:

In 1936, the average price of a new car was $610;
in 1965 it was $2,350;
by 1990 it was $15,472

In 2009 (according to WikiAnswers) a new car costs approximately $27,958

Here are the "latest" headlines

In 1936: Margaret Mitchell publishes novel "Gone with the Wind"
In 1965: A "Charlie Brown Christmas" premiers
in 1990: 1st Russian Orthodox service in 70 yrs held in St Basil's Cathedral

The dMarie Time Capsule has information up to the year 2002 and offers the choice between a quick page and an advanced page.

Click here to visit the dMarie Time Capsule

Five minutes after my daughter was born, my father began rhapsodizing about recreating his favorite photograph of my mother and I when I was a little girl. He was bound and determined that when my daughter reached the same age, a picture of us should be taken in the same pose using the same method.

As you can see in the photos below, he got his wish :o) I decided to use them for the first page of the heritage album; kind of a starting in the "now" and moving backward into the past...

I can remember my grandmother telling me all about going to the movies as a young girl every Saturday; it was a really big deal. Of course that was back in the day when there was no such thing as TV. She would go with a group of friends to watch the latest adventures in the Perils of Pauline. It cost them each a nickel, and was all they talked about from one Saturday to the next. It was a cliffhanger series, which meant that the end of the feature would find their heroine (Pauline) in dire straights indeed. There she would remain, until her long-awaited rescue on the following Saturday.

Running a search of places, names or events can help you find some wonderful images to add to your heritage pages and fill in blank spaces if you're short on actual photographs (or even if you're not). The page below is not finished, but look at the neat movie poster image I found to go with Nana's photos as a young girl ~ isn't it fun?

Everyone can think of something that didn't exist when they were younger. I remember the humble beginnings of desktop computers, videotapes and CDs to name a few. It's really kind of mind boggling, though, to contemplate older inventions with respect to our ancestors.

Case in point: my grandmother (the one pictured in the first module) was born in the year 1912. Did you know the first official sneakers to be mass marketed were Keds in the year 1917? That means Nana was born before sneakers existed. Is that wild or what?

Click here to visit the Innovation Timeline

Check out what I found mixed in with my Dad's old photos below; an exciting new safety feature called, "The Seat Belt" (oh WOW :o)

Don't just limit your scanner to photographs; use it for anything you can fit on the bed! I've scanned old letters, drawings, postcards, newspaper clippings, and books to name a few. I even scanned a 60 year old dandelion leaf that my father included in a letter home from camp one year (I couldn't believe my eyes when that fell out of the envelope). He called it a piece of "grace" in his letter :o)

The terrific thing about scans is that they can be resized and printed in whatever size you need help fill in a page (see album pages below). The newspaper clippings even printed out looking yellowed with age, to keep that vintage look true.

I still have the "Telling Tommy" books shown in the album page two photos up, they're on the family room bookcase :o) Even more amazing, was when I discovered this photo (inset) of my grandmother taken in front of the Christmas tree in 1912.

Why is it such a big deal to me? Because I still have this chair at my house today (my great grandfather refinished it sometime in the mid-1900s).

More remarkable? I came across an even older photograph (shown below) of my grandmother's mother not long ago, and SHE had the same chair next to her in the photo...wow, right?