Heritage Style Albums

Scrapbooks and albums are not just a collection of photos of the family vacation and kid's first days at school. The scrapbook concept has been used in many ways to hold onto the past.

Heritage style albums are an attempt to preserve, record and honor the heritage of those who have gone before. While it is typically about your family, it can also be your home town, your nationality, or any aspect of your personal history.
Here are some thoughts and ideas on how to assemble heritage style albums.

First, come up with a theme that will be applied to the project. This will help guide you in your choices of materials, layout and, of course, content.

For family scrapbook, a genealogical outline cam be very effective. By combining the family tree with photos and memorabilia, you can add a new dimension to the study of your family history.

Genealogical outlines help you to remember the relationships among the family members included in the heritage style scrapbook.

In addition to naming and dating each photo, you might want to include a short paragraph about each individual. General information about family branches will also be useful for someone who wants a complete picture of the family.When creating a genealogical format, there are a number of software packages and services available that not only help you find your ancestors, but can store and organize photos and information about each family member. Many will allow you to arrange the material in a scrapbook like format, which can be printed and included in your heritage style albums. This can produce a very professional result with less effort on your part.

Another format idea is to include the history of specific individuals, families, or groups. This format is well suited to community scrapbooks or scrapbooks that less about a specific family and more about a larger group. This format is likely to include newspaper clippings, notices, reproduction of historical documents, fact pages and other examples of tangible history. For example, if your community was once a center of the arts and crafts style of furniture building, assembling a scrapbook featuring this heritage could include the following:

• Photos of key artisans who worked in this industry, along with photos of their work.
  
  
• Newspaper clippings featuring reviews, articles and interviews.
  
  
• Historical facts about the arts and crafts movement and how it applied to your community.

Other community based themes for you heritage style albums could include:

• Important musicians, artists or artisans in a particular style or location.
  
  
• How a community responded to a significant event or tragedy, such as a storm, flood, or fire.
  
  
• The history of a genre in arts, science or literature. This could include things like 'Stars of Detective Movies', 'Pioneers of Space Flight', and 'Important Artists of the Midwest'. As long as it is a subject that you feel passionate about, heritage style albums are a good way to literally collect your thoughts.


• A scrapbook biography of a famous person or group of people.


• A collection of memories of your home town. Often people who immigrated here would settle near other people from the same village or city. Heritage style albums can be made documenting the old town. The people who came here, as well as those who stayed behind. Preserving precious memories for the first generation transplants, and showing the next generations a little about their heritage and past.

Don't limit your content. Be creative.

As mentioned above, newspaper clippings are common elements in heritage style albums, but there are other items that can be included as well:

• Tickets, programs and small posters or handbills. These can be from sporting events, plays or shows, speeches and conventions.


• Formal marriage announcements and invitations to a wedding can also be preserved in heritage style albums.


• Birth announcements, along with first photos.


• Graduation programs, senior pictures, a scanned image of the persons diploma.


• Maps showing the locations of important people and events related to your scrapbook.
  

Make sure that your media matches your subject. If your focus is on a historical period or people who lived in a previous generation, consider using bindings and pages that are reminiscent of that time. Lace and floral borders for a late nineteenth century/early twentieth century family book. Art Deco styles, backgrounds and illustrations for later in the twentieth century.

The sixties, seventies and eighties also had distinct design elements in popular culture.

Be careful about the paper and mountings that you use. Bargain albums and mounting supplies usually don't hold up as well as archival quality supplies. The cheaper stuff will dry out quickly and your layout will begin to fall apart.Also, common supplies and paper often have a high acid content, which can cause your photos and documents to decay more quickly. Since the point of heritage style albums are to preserve history for future generations, make sure that the supplies that you choose are up to the challenge.