Heritage Scrapping

  This past year I really got into tracing my genealogy. I love finding out about my ancestors and where they came from. My mom has a cousin that has been doing genealogy work her entire life so I had a lot of information that I was able to get about my maternal side without doing a lot of work. What saddens me though is that not a lot of photos have come down through the generations and the stories have been forgotten about these people. Sure, we are able to trace where they lived but finding out what they did, why they did it and such has long been lost.

     A big part of why I scrap is to preserve these stories and memories so future generations will be able to enjoy them. So, last week I dug out some older photos that I had scanned in from my father's family and scrapped them. I made sure to write down the important details on the layout itself and I may include a note on the back to include more details. I was able to use up some older & newer kits from The Scrap Room while doing this and I loved finding paper that would match the story and also some embellishments from my stash. All I have to say is I love Tim Holtz stuff! :) These were all created while we were having our Winter Crop at the Scrap Room and my next post will include my projects to help get your creative mojo going!

     I had an older picture of my father with his brother and father and I really wanted to scrap that along with some pictures of my uncle and father. My grandfather passed away when my father was young and we don't have too many pictures of them together so this one is special. This is the layout at the top of the post. I think I did it justice with an older kit from The Scrap Room, My Mind's Eye's 'Little Boy Blue' kit with some added embellishments from other kits and a 7 Gypsies velvet flower that was perfect for this picture. Then I scrapped a couple of pictures of my father and his brother when they were little on a one page layout. My uncle passed away when I was in high school and I know this relationship was special to my father so I wanted to capture a page about the relationship and not so much about each individual picture. I used a current kit from The Scrap Room, Fancy Pants' 'So Happy Together' line, along with some Hero Arts flowers and embellishments from some older kits that I had.

This last layout is one of my grandma and I when I was little. I had to convert the picture to black & white because it was a weird orange/brown color that was not too pretty.I hand stamped the heart borders on the top and bottom with a Heidi Grace stamp and cut the hearts using my cricut. This is also a current kit from The Scrap Room, Cosmo Cricket's 'Circa 1934' line. The tag has some hidden journaling and with all of these heritage layouts I also included some stitching (love using my sewing machine on layouts) and American Craft's Thickers alphas...another favorite!

     Hope this inspires you to scrap some older pictures and preserve those memories (and pictures!) for future genealogy buffs like me!