December 2019

A person’s own family is without doubt, the greatest wealth we will ever possess

Back in July, I mentioned in the “Finding the Calm in Big Projects” article that I am using Microsoft OneNote to pull my LifeStory book together on my paternal grandparents. I am purposely slowing down my research process and focusing on the small details that I find.

So, on the subject of details, I have to laugh because I just completed a 2-page layout covering a 1938 baseball game that my grandfather apparently attended – all coming from a one line note that I found in the local news section of my grandfather’s local newspaper. It mentioned that he saw a “most exciting game between the Chicago Cubs and Pittsburg Pirates” and also gave me some idea of when he had attended.

This is where, living in this particular time with availability to Google Searches, I was able to look up the 1938 Chicago Cubs’ schedule and yes, and I did find that they indeed played the Pittsburg Pirates for a 3-game stretch during that time. I love to see searching for one thing lead to another and then another. That’s the permission I gave myself this time around and it has been such a good thing.

Homer in the Gloamin

That little game that my grandpa attended? It ended with a homer by the Cubs in almost complete darkness, because Wrigley Field didn’t have lighting until 1988, and it became known as the “Homer in the Gloamin.” According to Wikipedia, it is “one of the most famous home runs in baseball folklore” and the name was given because of a popular song with the same title. This song was, “written and recorded [in 1911] by Harry Lauder. “Gloaming” is a regional dialect term of Scots origin denoting “twilight.” Writers tied the twilight timing of the homer together with this song and “Homer in the Gloamin” stuck.

Now folks, where can you make up this kind of a great story? Would I even know about such a story unless I had gone looking? Definitely not. My knowledge of baseball is pretty limited. Very limited. But here I am with a fascinating story of an event that my grandpa attended. Initially, I was going to just mention it in passing in one of my other articles because my grandfather does get back to Chicago later in life in a different capacity, but now it has its own layout and story behind that tiny little newspaper clipping.

Newspapers are Treasure-troves

I know I’ve been hitting the newspaper end of my research hard over the past couple of articles, but I just can’t tell you how much fun it is to find these little tidbits and then see what kind of story I can locate around them. Here, all these years, I’ve been feeling a bit forlorned because my family just doesn’t have massive amounts of heirloom items that have been passed down through the generations. I’ve been to many historical, reconstructed homes for important people, including some Presidents, on tours and just always left feeling wistful and wishing that my family had been a little bit more collective of their furniture, jewelry or what-nots.

But here’s what I’ve discovered from this recent project: I have had priceless bits of history and stories handed down to me. I just didn’t realize it. I had to do some work on my own to discover it all, which in my book, almost makes it more special to me. How many times have you heard that we take things for granted when we are given so much, but when we work hard for what we receive, we treasure it sometimes even more? (If you are a recipient of lots of wonderful heirloom items, I’m not saying you don’t appreciate it, I’m just saying that if you appreciate it already, imagine if you were to look for even more background information. Oh, the stories you might still have waiting to be found!)

Background information. Don’t we all love background papers? They set the stage for our layouts and determine the direction of tone. Well, those little bits of background that we search for with our family history is really the nugget of gold in my article this month. Take time. Slow down and enjoy the process!

Fine-tuning my own workflow

That July article that I mentioned at the beginning, is the same one that I shared a part of my writing workflow using Microsoft’s OneNote, but as I continue to work through this project, I’ve realized that I do a few other certain things that have allowed me to keep progressing forward. Since I can finally see the end of this project for my paternal grandparents, I think it is a good time to share some strategies that have been working well for me and maybe they can be helpful to you as well.

Over the next several months I’m going to share how I use file folders and OneNote together as a system to keep that calm going, even through the layout process. Diving into our family’s history can get overwhelming and I encourage you to keep breaking it down into small sections.

With that in mind, we can also become overwhelmed due to how we are organizing our documentation and our scrapbooking digital stash. (I use the term “stash” lovingly, but I think we all could agree that it can get even more out of control than the paper stashes that we (me in particular) can and do (or did) accumulate. So, I hope you come along with me as we continue on this journey of mine and I’d love to hear how you are all doing on your own LifeStory projects.

My layout?

Since I literally only have photos of my grandfather that date to around 1927-ish when my father was born or later around 1945-ish, I had to use what I had and selected a strategic section of my grandpa’s photo to use in my layout. I think that adding a photo, even if it isn’t the correct date, helps to tie my grandfather to the story. As I pulled together the items to use in my layout, I knew I wanted to use a background with some blue, some green and a little bit of orange. Thankfully, Anna Aspnes’ Heath Palette fit the bill and gave me the green for the baseball field and blue for sky. Perfect! My orange-y items would be the dash of extra color from my added items along with some colored brushes to help the layout flow from one side to the other. And what good fortune to find a leaf from the mini palette Eutaxy, with a little hue tweaking, gave me a little element and a splash of orange. Oh, my gosh… Listen to me. I sound like it was so well thought out, but it was really playing around until I found the right fit.

Blending is the secret sauce to Anna’s layout recipe and it has been such great timing to have the Champions course recently devoted to blending. If you haven’t ever tried to use blending or brushes, it has been the magic for my LifeStory project.

Note:  I have been posting monthly heritage articles for Scrapaneers since December 2016 and this article originally appeared September 27th, 2019, on The Scrapaneers’ Society website in a series titled “Family History Basics.”  My articles are meant to encourage us all to get our own LifeStories written down and I’ve been given permission to repost them here on my own website. If you are interested in learning more about digital scrapbooking, The Scrapaneers’ Society has wonderful classes available from beginner to advanced.

We all find it so important to document our family’s life (especially with kids and our pets), but do you ever feel the overwhelm of it when it comes to getting your own story told?

Feeling stuck?

The reason I bring this up is that I recently had a conversation with a woman about her pioneer ancestors and before I knew it, we got to the topic that really seemed to be a hot button for her — getting her own story told. The overwhelming-ness of it all had her stuck.

This journey I have been on for the past three years has felt like a struggle as well, so I could instantly relate to her. The good news is that my struggle has left me with positive shifts in my thoughts. You would laugh if you could see how many starts and stops I have taken with my own attempts to bring my LifeStory book to “life.”

Goals are a good thing

It all seems so simple. I mean, how hard could it be to make a book that showcases my ancestors’ lives with photos, stories, and documents that I have obtained over the past twenty years? And, add to that, the fact that I wanted the books to be read by my children and treasured for many generations. My vision seemed fairly simple: I wanted the pages to be beautiful to the eyes and entice the reader to not only read each page but kind of rest on it and get to know their ancestor through my eyes.

I bring all this up because my ultimate goal is to not only document my children’s lives, my family’s ancestors, but to also get to the point of getting my own LifeStory told the way that I would like it to be done…in my own voice.

Originally, I started out with my parents and I have quite a bit of documents, stories and of course, photos for their generation, but, really? Trying to get all the different stages in their life down into a format that I loved and felt would do them justice has been a challenge. I get a page done and then see another type of style to try and quickly flitter between so many styles that it hurts to think about. Not very calming.

Shift in thinking

How did I handle that problem? I decided that starting with my parents might not be the best idea. They were too close to me and the need to get it right was too strong and my indecisiveness was drowning me. The lightbulb came on at what was exactly the right moment and I knew as soon as I realized that I needed to move on to the next generation, my grandparents. It is kind of like the Three Bears story, isn’t it? My parents were too hard; my great, great, great grandparents were too far away and my grandparents were “just right.”

But let’s stop for a second…because while they are much easier to work with, the real lightbulb moment to this is the fact that all the starts and stops that I took have helped me to get to this point. When I saw the style that I am now working with, it all clicked and the pages are coming together effortlessly AND I am enjoying the process. If I had started with my grandparents three years ago, I might still be in a style rut and still trying to find my path. The real gem in all of this is that I allowed myself the time to play around with different styles, continue to locate new documents that have come online over the past three years and now, it is finally all coming together and making sense.

Enter calm

I allowed myself the time to organize my photos and add bits and pieces to the stories that I knew that I wanted to add, or better yet, remember. And the cherry to top everything off? I have taken one more paradigm shift: I am no longer writing for my children’s benefit or anyone else’s. It is all for me. (There… I said it, and I’m OK with it!)  My LifeStory books are my way to remember my grandparents and eventually my own parents.

I’m not vain enough to think that everyone suffers from the same type of overwhelm that I have felt, but if you do, cut yourself a break and keep on going. If you are having a hard time working on the entire project, then start with one photo and describe your memories or what it means to you to see that photo.

More than one way

I’ve been using Microsoft OneNote for several years with my work, but using the table feature is where I feel like I have made the most progress in pulling my stories together visually. Lots of different ways to do this and everyone has to experiment a bit to find their own workflow, but this has really taken the “overwhelming” word out of the mix. You might find something like Trello helpful as well where you can add a card for each picture or subject.

The lady I was talking with? I suggested that she begin to write a blog post about each photo or subject and the lightbulb went on for her. It made the project seem easy to do. One post at a time and she could share it with whoever she wanted to and it could become a family project. When she finally was ready to make that LifeStory book, she would have all the posts to pull together into one book. Easy-peasy.

My own workflow example

As I said, there are quite a few options out there and I have tried a majority of them and landed on OneNote. Here’s a snippet of what a section of my grandmother’s notebook looks like. There are no bells and whistles but it has given me calmness in my process and that is priceless in my book!

The Layout Process is Coming Together

Again, as far as my layout, I am still working with products from Anna Aspnes Designs. This particular layout is so near and dear to me that I felt like a little girl all over again — visiting my grandmother’s home. I ended up using mostly pieces from the ArtsyTransfers Rougir, the Multimedia Roses No. 1, and the ArtPlay Palette Rougir. The colors made me think of my grandmother and the girly-girl things that I enjoyed playing with as that little girl with a big imagination. I haven’t totally mastered Anna’s artsy style but I love each layout and by the time I get both sides of my grandparents done, I think I will be at the right place to take on my parent’s book.

Setting myself up for success

I’m working on this side of my grandparents’ generation, but guess what else I’m also doing? I’m setting up Notebooks for each couple that I will be working on including myself so that as I see a picture or think of a funny story that I don’t want to forget, the framework is set up for me to add it into OneNote. You see where I’m going with this, don’t you? By the time I am ready to tackle my parents and myself, I will have already done a lot of the hard work — culling the photos and the stories that I really want to tell. And as I read and re-read through it from time to time, I can be working on the text in the story so that it sounds the way I want it to.

Any other ways?

Like I said earlier, it is not about my way in particular. I’m just sharing to get the conversation started. Please feel free to chime in and share what works best for you when you are contemplating a big project like your family’s heritage LifeStory!

Note:  I have been posting monthly heritage articles for Scrapaneers since December 2016 and this article originally appeared July 27th, 2019, on The Scrapaneers’ Society website in a series titled “Family History Basics.”  My articles are meant to encourage us all to get our own LifeStories written down and I’ve been given permission to repost them here on my own website. If you are interested in learning more about digital scrapbooking, The Scrapaneers’ Society has wonderful classes available from beginner to advanced.

As each layer of your research starts to come together, I hope that you find yourself actually looking forward to “the hunt.” I’ve always said that family history research is the best reality show that there ever could be. It’s our own show exclusively about us! This month, as we continue to add layers into our research toolkit, it’s time to look at books. That could look like an actual trip to a library where your ancestors lived or it could be from your home early in the wee hours. Let’s tap into the massive scanned book collections of Google Books, Internet Archive, FamilySearch.org and Ancestry.com.

“For in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be.” — John Connolly

Inspiration

I’m a grandmother to two under-two-year-old grandchildren and one eight-year-old grand-daughter so I’m in that point of my life where I am watching my children’s children take the form of the future adults they will grow up to become and can I just say that it is uh-mazing! As I have worked on my next layout for my paternal grandparents’ booklet, it has actually helped me to understand exactly why I always knew that I would have my own grandma’s stash of toys. Isn’t that what scrapbooking does for us? It allows us to process our thoughts as we “paint” our layouts with photos, colors and stories?  Looking into our own family history works on a similar line when it allows us to pull old thoughts together and run them through a new filter – the filter of new stories that give us “the rest of the story” as a famous radio personality used to say.

Who doesn’t love a good book?

Anyhoo… let’s get back to this month’s tool – books. At the risk of sounding like I grew up in the really old days, I could tell you that I originally had to do all my family history research by going to a library and actually pulling books, copying pages on a copier and bringing them home to make sense of what all I had uncovered. Well… I certainly did that and maybe that is why I have a serious appreciation for the ability to perform online searches through books that have been OCR’d!

Power of the Search

Indexes in books are incredibly important, but having the ability to Search a book on any word that we want is powerful. If you have never tried looking for your ancestor’s name in an online book, you should definitely try it right now. There is the chance that you will hear crickets from the responses, but there is also the chance that you could find your family’s story (or at least a portion of it!)

There are techniques that help, especially with Google’s Search, like placing your ancestor’s name in quotes and then adding the place name of where they lived. Once you get the millions of results, look at the top of the search box area for the “MORE” dropdown menu and click on it. You will see “BOOKS” as an option and you will want to click on that as well.

This brings us to a whole different area of Google and it is a good thing, believe me! If you find a book that looks promising, click on it and you will either have a snippet view or have the entire book to peruse. If you get the latter, then you can click through the pages that match your search criteria at the top of the page or you can perform a new search within the book by typing your new search terms in the box on the left-hand side of the page. If you find yourself with the snippet view, then you can click on the option to Find in a Library and you can then try and locate the book in a nearby library. (Don’t be put off by this if you don’t live anywhere near the library where it is held because here in the United States, our interlibrary loan system is a fantastic resource to add to your toolkit. Librarians are always our best friends!)

Why do most of the searchable books look older? It is because they are outside of the copyright time period or have been given the rights to upload the book. One more tip for Google Books is that you can add the book to your own “library” so that you can locate it in the future and they have even more filtering options, so just click away and see what you come up with.

Don’t forget to Save

My tip for you would be to Snip a picture of the pages that you need along with the title page and then make them into a PDF so you can save them all together in one document.

I’ve touched on Google Books in this article, but the other powerhouse in the book area is Internet Archive (Archive.org). “Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.” If you have never come across it, you might want to set aside some time and just start clicking away. You can just search their books, but as you see, they have way more than just books.

When I perform a search on Google and one of the results shows a book from the Internet Archive, I click on the book and then always perform a Search in the box up at the top. (Just make sure that you type your search term into the box that says, “Search inside” in the box. Otherwise, you will be doing a search through the entire archive.)

FamilySearch.org also has a massive amount of scanned books so give them a try as well. You will need to click on the Search option at their Home screen and then choose Books. You will need a username but the site is free. There are some books that are only viewable at their FamilyHistory sites. If it looks promising, the physical FamilyHistory sites are well worth the trip and they are open to the public.

I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention Ancestry.com and their ever-growing book supply. As always, if you don’t have a subscription, remember to check with your local library!

“You’re off to Great Places! Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting, So… get on your way!” – Dr. Seuss

I’d love to hear if you have any luck in locating new information in an online book resource.

Just a note on my layout on the cover page… As I said last month, I have quickly become a fan of Anna Aspnes’ Artsy world, especially as I pull together my heritage booklet for my grandparents. When I remembered my grandmother, part of what would always pop up in my thoughts was her great old toys that she kept in a closet in her bedroom. I was fascinated with them because they were nothing like any toy I had ever seen and they gave me a lot of enjoyment on visits to my grandparents’ home. I knew that I needed to include them into my booklet, but how to do that without actual pictures? I googled the ones I remembered vividly and saved small pics of them, hoping to be able to use them somehow. Well, adding them to a layout just ended up looking messy but when I enlarged them (by a LOT) and then blended them into Anna Aspnes’ Artsy paper (ArtPlayMiniPaletteEutaxy_ArtsyPaper3), suddenly things started to take on their own life and my smile as well as enjoyment grew exponentially. This type of scrapbooking has literally given me back my sense of artistic fun!

Note:  I have been posting monthly heritage articles for Scrapaneers since December 2016 and this article originally appeared June 28th, 2019, on The Scrapaneers’ Society website in a series titled “Family History Basics.”  My articles are meant to encourage us all to get our own LifeStories written down and I’ve been given permission to repost them here on my own website. If you are interested in learning more about digital scrapbooking, The Scrapaneers’ Society has wonderful classes available from beginner to advanced.