Scrapbook A Family Tree

Creating a family tree can be a lot of fun. Starting out with the most basic information like your parents and grandparents is usually pretty easy for most people. Scrapbooking a family tree can be even more challenging, and interesting.

Growing up, my Grandmother had a family tree framed in her house. It was very simple, but I liked looking at it as a child. It was a framed picture of a drawing of a tree, with a bunch of lines on the tree where you could fill in your ancestors. I remember looking at that as a child and wondering about those people.

Having a display like this in your home is a good way to share family history with your children. It is a good conversation piece for visitors, also. While my Grandmother’s simple family tree was still intriguing as a child, my cousin created something that was even more impressive. She created a family tree with photographs. She is an artist and very talented. She worked on it as a gift for my Aunt (her mother) and her sister. When she gave the gift to my Aunt, we were all in awe and very jealous of this beautiful gift she had given.

When creating this family tree, she used beautiful papers, scrapbooking supplies, like tiny frames, and her artistic ability to create a majestic tree, full of pictures of her ancestors, dates, and places. So, unlike the simple family tree of my Grandmother’s, this has life.

In the center, there is a picture of her mother’s family. Below that, and not technically a part of the branches, she has pictures of her mom with her siblings, and her Mom’s children (herself included). Above her mother’s family picture is a picture of our grandparents. The tree goes out from there. She did a wonderful job of shrinking these precious family photos so that they would fit on the tree, and give faces to the names. That is what family history is all about, right? She explains through this project, she got to “know” some of these ancestors of ours.

What’s the point of knowing the name if you don’t know the history behind the name? To see a face there, gives that person life. It gives the viewer a chance to realize that they did live a life. It makes the descendent (like myself), want to know more about exactly what kind of life they did live.

This is one way that scrapbooking your family history can bring your ancestors to life. While not everyone may have time to create something like my cousin did, you can still scrapbook those stories, memories, and faces that really mean so much to your ancestry.

Meredith Ethington is the author of this blog. To learn more about Meredith and her history with Scrapbooking and Genealogy go here.