How to Create a Family Scrapbook

One of the more creative (and portable!) ways to preserve family memories and genealogical history is to collect all of this information into a scrapbook themed around your family history. Learning how to make a family scrapbook is easy and you can get started today.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Old and new family photographs going back at least three generations (to your grandparents)
• Blank scrapbook
• Decorations, such as stickers and die cuts
• Acid-free colored card stock or construction paper
• Acid-free scrapbooking pens
• Sharp scissors
• Family tree information, printed or written out
• Scrapbooking adhesives

Create a Scrapbook of Your Family History

1. Group your photographs according to era or generation. For example, all photos of your grandparents could go in a group. You could also put all photos taken during the 1920s or 1930s into a group. Set these groups aside for later placement into the scrapbook.

2. Plan your pages. There are lots of possibilities here. You could give each relative or ancestor to be included in the scrapbook his own individual page, for example, or you could organize your pages according to family events like weddings or vacations.

3. Try organizing pages by family groupings. For example, you could devote one set of pages to your sister's family and another set of pages to your brother's family.

4. Gather your decorations. You will want decorations that are appropriate to the layout of each page. If you have a page devoted to Grandma Ruth, for example, and she loved to collect ceramic turtles and made wonderful chocolate chip cookies, you may want to include turtle stickers and die cuts of cookies on her page in the scrapbook.

5. Create any decorations that you need and do not have already made. You can use acid-free construction paper, an acid-free scrapbooking pen and sharp scissors to create and cut out paper decorations and designs for your scrapbook pages.

6. Use scrapbooking adhesives to affix your photos and decorations to the blank pages in your scrapbook.

7. Collect family tree information so you can include a family tree. Create a tree from different pieces of paper you glue together (a technique known as paper piecing). Then, add the names, dates and places of birth and dates and places of death (if applicable) of your relatives to the branches. Affix a small photo of each person to his branch.

Tips & Warnings

• Talk to the oldest members of your family to get information needed to fill in any blanks in your family tree. You can also ask them for copies of old family photographs if you don't have any of your own. Make sure you reassure them that you will quickly return the originals once the copies have been made.