Branching out

Okay, that was a lame title! lol -- but I have begun to make my "branch" pages for my family heritage album. This one stars my maternal great-grandparents Arthur Lee and Maggie Ophelia (Westbrook) Campbell. The larger photo at the bottom is of my grandfather, as he is my direct ancestor. I didn't have a photo of his sister who died while still an infant, so I used a silhouette, but now my mother tells me she has a photo of baby Maggie Idora -- she just doesn't know where. As she put it, "Maggie Idora is buried twice; once in Deport and also in my house!"

If you'd like details on the designers/kits I used, you can hop over to my craft blog page here. There's also a bit in that post about my plans for the branch pages. In addition to those "strictly facts" pages, I want to make separate pages for special pictures, or particular people, or whatever reason pops into my head!

You can click on the image if you'd like to see it larger.

Oh, yes -- my page about my grandmother was featured on Faith Sisters' "Made Ya Look Monday" page this week! Woooot!

More heritage scrapbooking

I've done another layout that will eventually go in my Family Heritage album. Again, this one is digital instead of paper. (For more info about the scrapping part, you can go to my "Stacy's Stamp and Scrap Loft" blog where I've also posted this layout.)


The girls are my dad's mother Susie Richardson Smith (in the middle) and two of her sisters (Kate, on the left, and Ida to the right). I love how they had these photos taken in the same positions five years apart! The Richardsons were a very close family, and from the tales I've been told, they had a lot of fun together! "Ma" Richardson (Una Dorn Richardson) kept a journal at the family home, and whenever any of the kids were home visiting they would write in it. Often it was just facts like "Susie and Mike were here, with kids," and the date, but it was in that person's handwriting. Sometimes they commented about how stuffed they were from Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner. The last entry is quite sad and poignant, as it was written by Ida after Ma was moved to a nursing home. It talks about the great memories that home holds, also, so it's bittersweet.

I'll be back later with more heritage scrapping. I've got plans for the Family Heritage scrapbook ...

Heritage Scrapbooking

This is something I've been really wanting to do, especially since I've been collecting heritage photos of my family. So this weekend, since I needed an excuse to use some of the digital scrapbooking stuff I'd been collecting, I thought I'd make a layout using my favorite photo of my maternal grandmother and referring to the Bible passage that describes how she was so well (Proverbs 31:10-31) Now, normally I'm a "traditional" (paper) scrapper. I love to feel of the paper and embellishments in my hands as I manipulate them around to make the layout I want. Digi-scrapping layouts, when you get them printed, are, of course, completely 2-D, no matter how 3-D they may look. That bugs me. But I like a lot of things about digital scrapping (like the way you can reuse "papers" and elements over and over, and change their size or color to fit what you're doing), so I'm not averse to doing the occasional digital layout.

Here's the one I made of Granny (you can click on the image to see it larger):



I think she would have liked this page, although she would have disagreed with my assessment of her as being so wonderful (she really was!).

So this is something I really want to do more of -- scrap my family tree and also make layouts of individual people, to honor them as I think they should be honored!

Spiritual Heritage

I finally got around to finishing a digital scrapbook layout I did a few months ago when I was still a member of PaperCraft Planet social networking site and moderating a group focused on Christian crafting. I had a faithbooking project going there, and this is the last page I made for it. I didn't have as many family heritage photos scanned in then, and really didn't like the one I had to use for my dad's dad, so last night I decided to go in and change the photo. It took me 1-1/2 hours to do that simple little thing (I had altered the original color of the oval frame that I used on all the pictures, and hadn't saved it, so I had to try to match the color, then scale it, then figure out how to cut the right size oval out of the photo and get it behind the frame -- it all sounds so simple, but clearly, it wasn't!). I posted it on GenealogyWise, which is a new social network for family historians and genealogists, in the Scrapping Your Family History (or whatever it's called) group. So here it is:


If you'd like to see it larger, just click on it.

I have no recollection of the designers or whatever of any of the elements. (I always like to post the brands, etc. of the things I use in scrapping and card making, because I figure they made the stuff, they deserve the credit.)

ANYway.

I joined Footnote.com the other day. It's a website with tons of digitized original documents (like Civil War Service Records, census images from 1880 and 1930, etc.). It was $60 for a year (they had a special). I don't know yet if it will be worth the money. For some reason my ancestors are always undocumented or it's hard to find their info. Census images aren't a problem, but I already have most of those off Ancestry. I did find the actual images of one of my ancestors' Civil War records. Before joining Footnote I only had the index information on that. So that was cool. But the Civil War era is so frustrating because they often just put the soldier's first and middle initials with their last name. So instead of finding Elijah William Smith, I have to look through all the other E. W. Smiths in Mississippi (and they are legion, or so it seems) and try to decide if the info is for MY E. W. Smith. Fortunately, for most of my Civil War soldier ancestors I know the regiments they were in. This helps tremendously.

Oddly, I'm having trouble finding military documentation for my 5-greats-grandfather who served in the Revolutionary War and then was one of the original Old Three Hundred colonists who came to Texas. He's been celebrated by the DAR, has DAR medallions on his headstone, etc. But I can't find the documentation on his service with the South Carolina militia that was under Gen'l Francis Marion. I found several Alexander Hodge papers for North Carolina ... wondering if there was a mistake or if he served somehow for NC. Or if that's a different Alexander Hodge entirely. I wouldn't think that was an incredibly common name, but what do I know about common names back then?

Well, the morning is almost over, I need to go take a shower and get dressed, and then take the kid to the orthodontist. So, until next time ...