Archiving Genealogical and Family History Information the Beautiful Way

Genealogy is considered by many people to be the fastest-growing hobby in North America. Many surveys and media sources proclaim that it has surpassed quilting, stamp collecting and even gardening in popularity, according to Professional Genealogist Kimberly Powell. A recent Maritz poll reported that "approximately 60 percent of the U.S. population is interested in family history, up from 45 percent just five years ago."

How to Archive Family Research Data

So with all of this gathering of information, the question arises. "What do you do with it all?" Whether you are doing strict genealogy, meaning the mere collecting of facts and the accounting of kinship, or family history in the broader sense, meaning the the gathering of additional details about lives of your ancestors, and providing historical context, you will want a way to archive your findings. Many people just print out everything they find and keep it in a notebook. They print out descendency charts they find online, make scans of documents like birth and death certificates, and print them out and file them in the notebook as well.

Don't just print it, scrap it

But there is another option, one that can make your family data into a masterpiece that will be enjoyed by your family for years, and proudly handed down from generation to generation. By combining your genealogical passion with another popular hobby, scrapbooking, you can turn your family history into beautiful works of art.

You don't even need to leave your home to do this, it can be done right on your computer. You may think you don't know enough about using a graphics program to do this, or can't afford one. But there are free products available, such as PhotoMix that are especially made for laying out scrapbook pages and printing them. Of course, if you are familiar with Programs such as Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, you can use these as well.

You also don't need to be an artist yourself. Digital Scrapbook designers offer beautiful kits crammed full of coordinated designs that you can use. While most are meant for scrapping photos, they can easily handle genealogical data as well. You can find many free digital kits online, or purchase them at a very low cost. Some designers even specialize in kits for family history scrapping, such as the ones used in the samples on this article. (See more samples.) All that's required is to place the specialty page into the scrapbook software and add the appropriate content.

You can then save the finished pages as in image file, which you can share online with your family and friends, and print out and put into a scrapbook. As you gather your information, continue to make new pages with it, and before you know it, you will have a beautiful heirloom that you will be enormously proud of. If you prefer not to print the pages yourself, you can have them printed at places like Office Depot for a very small price.

Using Ancestry.com's Book Printing Feature

Also, if you are a member of Ancestry.com, you can use their printing service, upload your pages, arrange them into a book, and have them print your creations into a stunningly beautiful, bound coffee table book. If you wish to do this, you will need to design your pages in landscape orientation, and they give you several size and album cover options. The cost for this is affordable, and these books make excellent gift items that the recipients will truly treasure.

Using Ancestry's service, you can also upload the individual elements from scrapbook kits and use them to design your pages right there in their designer. This allows you to incorporate actual data, stories and sources that you have added to your family tree, such as genealogy charts, family group sheets and stories. It's a marvelous tool. The one downside is that you cannot save the pages you create as external files to be shared with others or display online, though you are able to print them out yourself from there.

Traditional Paper Scrapping

If you prefer, you can, of course, scrap your family history data using paper supplies just as your do your family photos. A combination of Paper and Digital scrapping can turn out some amazing results as well.

Whatever way you choose to construct it, creating a family history scrapbook will give you much more satisfaction than merely printing of the data, and leave your family with a priceless heirloom. So what are you waiting for? Get scrapping!