Heritage Scrapbooking
record your family's history

Who are you, and where do you come from? Here we look at capturing your heritage, scrapbooking those important people in your life now, and those of yester-year. It maybe that you know very little about them, but there may be photo's or mementos that have been left behind, which will help you start your family tree research.

Heritage scrapbooking pages leave a legacy for your children, and their children, and the more detail you can include, the better picture later generations will have of their forebears.

Shirley created this page of her first husband's mother (my grandmother)

Creating your heritage scrapbooking album

The number of pages in your album will depend on how much information you have about the members of your family. Take every opportunity of asking your parents or grandparents about the people and events shown in your old family photographs just like Wenda Top did when her mother was ill. You might like to record the stories you are told for posterity. Some information will inevitably have been lost and you will need to turn to documents and records to find out facts and figures in order to trace your genealogy back further and further.

Let's look at some of the people who you could include in your heritage scrapbook pages...

What information can you include in your album about these people, apart from their photographs?

This will be easier with those closer to you, but how about mentioning any or all of the following ideas...

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The more of these details you can include, the more your pages will come to life. Also, of course, the more you will learn about yourself and any similarities you share with your ancestors.

But who am I?

If you were adopted and do not know anything of your heritage, you may be thinking of starting to search for information. Your adopted parents may support you in your search or may advise you against doing so.

If it proves difficult to find out anything about past generations of your family, you could always start an album all about yourself. In time, this could be handed down and form the basis of a heritage scrapbook of the future. Add pages detailing your life, including things about you that you think future generations might like to know.

If you do not have children, and do not plan to do so, it is still worth creating your book. You are important to others around you, and they may love to get a glimpse into what makes you YOU!

You are likely to learn a lot about yourself while creating your album, and that is never a bad thing!

Looking into the future

In today's digital world, it is possible to leave more behind for those that follow, than just photographs.

Imagine being able to hear the voices of your great grandparents, or to even watch them go about their daily chores! Wouldn't that be fantastic? Of course the technology wasn't around back then, but it is now! You can record the stories that your grandparents tell you of when they were young. You can video them, both at special occasions and in everyday life.

Digital heritage scrapbooking is possible, but it will need to be kept updated as technology changes. After all if your parents had created albums on floppy discs back in the 90s you may have trouble even after this short time, finding a computer with a disc drive that would read it.

Todays CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray will move onto newer forms of storage and you will want to create copies of your important data so that it is still accessible as time goes by. Don't forget to print out a copy of your pages, onto acid free paper with long lasting inks so that everyone can see and understand your family history.