Family Matters: A monthly article on Heritage Albums

Have you all been working on your heritage albums? Have you found some things you'd like to include, but you don't know how it will look? Sometimes, you end up with treasures that look considerably more modern than the rest of the album. Well, this month, I'm going to show you what I did with some photocopies of things I had that I wanted to use. I didn't want to include the plain white copy paper and I didn't want to make a special trip one other place to get copies made on special paper. It was December and I had enough to do before Christmas! So, with a little ingenuity I came up with the perfect camouflage - CHALKS.

The chalks I'm referring to are the kind rubber stampers use and that more and more scrapbookers are starting to use. They are acid - free and usually come on a plastic palette in little boxes, one for each color. All of the images below are really done on plain white paper to begin with. I simply used a makeup sponge to randomly smear tan, yellow-orange and a little brown into the paper. I rubbed the chalks into the paper with a circular motion, evenly, and before I trimmed my piece to its final dimensions. That way, you are sure to cover the edges of the paper. It's very easy and I think you will agree, very effective.

This photocopy of an obituary has a lot of great information for an ancestor I didn't have a picture of. I'm not sure where it came from, since all I had was the copy from my great-grandmother's research. I colored it with the chalks, as I described above, and then trimmed with deckle edged scissors. I mounted the whole on brown cardstock which I dry embossed and colored. The effect of the whole thing is important - it won't get lost on the page.

Again, this was a small article that I had only a copy of. It is on a page that has several things I have treated in the same manner, including the next picture, all mounted to coordinate with each other and the rest of the book. I wanted to draw attention to two of the girls names, so I journaled to include the important points.

This one I am very proud of. This ancestor was one of the founding members of this synagogue. I have lots of stories about him, which I journaled thoroughly, but it is nice to have something to look at as well. I found this picture, a copy of an old engraving, in a book about the history of Atlanta. I knew the rough colors from other descriptions I had read. So, I copied and enlarged the picture from the book. Then I colored in the image with colored pencils and then treated the whole surface with the chalks. It is nostalgic and at the same time very informative.

With this ancestor, the only picture I had of him was the one in the photocopy of the article about his death. Plus, the story about the trolley car was too wonderful to miss. I colored the columns, cut them to fit (something you wouldn't want to do with an original) and laid them out. With the right background and a few stickers, the whole page fits in very nicely with the rest of the album.

I hope this has been interesting to you and that you'll be able to include some things you wouldn't have otherwise. This history is too valuable to waste!

Next month, we're going to try a new feature that we will continue to do occasionally - Ask Jenna. Each month, I get dozens of questions which I love to answer, but I thought you might all enjoy hearing, too. Sometimes, you guys really push me and I learn more! I'll still respond to your question as I get it, but if you don't mind, I'd like to post the question and the answer on this site. If you don't want me to, or if you would like your question edited before publication, let me know. I'll still be happy to answer it. But sharing is one of the great benefits of scrapbooking, so please ask your questions!