Creating a Genealogy Family Memory Book, Part 2

This is one page from another of my Family Memory Books. It is the start of the section on my son's grandfather Jack and I wanted to show the different looks you can achieve.

Since I have Jack's old British passport I thought it would be a good idea to scan and place it in this Memory Book for my son and his children. I also included on this page a photo of Jack as a choir boy, the death certificate of his father, and a treasured photo of Jack in the streets of London England in WW11.

I use a very old program called Microsoft Picture It! Publishing 2001. There may well be much better and fancier ones available. But mine suits my purposes and allows me to create fancy or coloured backgrounds, fancy borders, edge effects, fade out effects and much more. Best of all, you can play around with the photos and documents right in the program. So you can change your layout and text and see exactly how it will look before you print. You can also save it as a webpage or email it to someone else.

This second image shows the same page but with a few changes. Here I created a fancy border around the photo of Jack as a choir boy. I also created a soft blurred edge effect around the top left photo of Jack in London England during WW11. Lastly I created a sepia background on which to place the photos. The choices are endless!

My first few Memory Books were plain and simple. I just wanted to place the images in a manner that was pleasing to me but I wanted to do them quickly. The more pages I created, the more I liked what was happening! I began to slow down and experiment.

Another thing I really like about Picture It! is that you can create 50 pages in the project, and you can place your images in the tray while you arrange and rearrange to your heart's content. It's rather like rearranging the living room but you don't have your husband complaining about moving the piano to seven different spots until you find the right place!