Fun with Words Designs



Woordle ExampleIt is fun to be imaginative with some of the genealogical research you have gathered over the years, especially for any presentation. If you are making a scrapbook, a display, a booklet, etc. on your collection of ancestors an interesting program exists online to make your assemblage more fascinating.

Online there is a free site called ‘Wordle‘ where you can create an assembly of key names, dates, terms, places, events,etc. into what is termed ‘word clouds’. It is simply placing a selection of words which form clusters of ‘clouds’ which have the greater prominence to words that appearing most frequently in the entire text. Overall, a word size is proportional to the number of times the word appears. Repeating certain words increases the font size.

Once you have typed in your selection of words, you can have the program randomly make font, style and color arrangements or you can choose your own layouts, fonts and colors under the ‘edit, language, font, layout and color’ sections. Under the language section, to keep any dates inserted, make sure the box at the top about dates is not checked.

You might have a phrase instead of one-single word to insert. Use the tilde character ~ between words that go together. If you don’t note the words that go together with the tilde they will be separated. If you don’t like the overall design, keep changing the lay-out, colors, etc. However, if you want to add or delete words, you just start over with ‘create’.

It is fun either way, first seeing what the random selection arranges or what you can design. The more words you add to a common theme the more creative it becomes.

The instructions are clearly written out and easy to follow. Once you come up with the desired design, you can ‘print screen’ and save it to your hard drive. There is the option to just print a paper copy immediately of what was created. There is no end to the number and variety you can create, use your imagination.

Some of the different cluster of words you might select could be all the family surnames, all ancestors’ given names, the names of hometowns of the ancestors, and the various occupations held by family members. You can do birth dates, important family years (marriages, births) or do up a ‘word cloud’ on a certain person, including all known facts, names, dates, occupations, interests, hobbies, etc. on that ancestor. Most important, be creative and have fun doing so.

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