Fruits of their Love -AKA- Descendants book

When working on your family history it is only natural to start with what you know which is usually you, your parents, and when in luck, your grandparents.
Fact is, this is not all your immediate Family History. You are part of your grandparents family tree, you are part of the "History of their Future", and so are any of your siblings and their descendants and any of your cousins, their parents and their descendants.
It will have to come a point when you have all of these Family Histories together, because they are indeed part of your own.

I have decided to create a Descendant book for both my set of grandparents. Each descendant is indeed a Fruit of their Love, a fruit of the Santoriello and/or Iannone Family tree.
Since I am going to share it with my cousins in Italy, it is written in  Italian.
It is going to have a page with some genealogical info and some Family History, and a page with the family cluster for each descendant.
Here is how it is going to look:
Nonno Vincenzo Santoriello and Antonia Bottiglieri descendants book:

 "I Frutti del Loro Amore" in Italian means "The Fruits of their Love"

My dad's parents had 6 children, and sadly my grandma died of childbirth, together with her baby, hence I put an angel in place of the baby.

This is part of the page with some of the Family history/ wedding and kids birthday info.

Gerardo Iannone and Michelina Sannazzaro descendats book:

 

My mom's parents had 7 children, and 5 of them had 3 children each who also had an average of 2-3 children each. You can tell that this book is going to have quite a few pages!

 Thanks to the import feature I was able to make the pages for my parents and me and my siblings' family clusters only once in one book, and then import it in the other, since we are descendants of both sets of grandparents:

Naturally this is just a draft, but it gives you the idea.
Right now I am creating it in a softbound 8x8 book, but thanks to the new import feature, I will be able to transform it in any format I want:
8x8 hardcover book,
12x12 hard cover book
or if I want to add new family clusters as my younger cousins start getting married and having children, I could create a post bound album to then fill with 12x12 pages.
To make it more portable, I could make a 5x5 book out of it, or even a 5x5 flipbook or swatchbook(I would need more than one since they come only in 10 pages).
As you can see, I have options;)
The best part of these books, though, it is their purpose as a tool to help me entice my cousins and their families to share photos and info that I haven't been able to get yet, and that for sure I will not find in civil or parish records any time soon.
Here is how:

I created a facebook group for the descendants of my grandparents on my dad side, and one for the descendants of my grandparents on my mom's side.

I added any cousin I know on facebook from each line, and I shared a few pages of the book asking for help in finding the missing info.
In just a day, I got some info on my grandparents and a whole video full of pictures that my cousins made for their dad, which has all of his children and grand children. Not bad!
I still need more pictures and info, but I can already see that my idea is working!!!
Stay tuned if you are curious to know when I will have completed my grandparents' descendants books, and which one is going to be completed first.

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Looking for distant cousins

Today I am going to talk about my husband's family side, more precisely his grandma's father's  side.
We are looking to find distant cousins, descendants of Martin Lorenzo Dow Knight and Julia Judenia White.
We have already found many, but we know there are many more yet to be found and probably pictures that we haven't seen yet.
With the pictures we were able to find and share with each other, I created this Descendancy poster, and I am hoping that looking at the pictures, names and dates somebody will recognize their ancestors and will contact us.
So, here it is:

(click on the image to magnify it)
The Knights were originally from Alabama, and then moved to Tennessee.
Martin Lorenzo Dow was son of Davis (1815-1875) and Sarah(1820-1880) Knight, and among his siblings were
Francis M. Knight,
Elizabeth L. Knight,
Eliza J. Knight,
Jesse Jackson Knight ( who married Julia Judenia's sister, Eustacia Bell (Ada) White),
William M. Knight ( who married Zelphia Almedia Amerson)  and
Mary C. Knight.
If you recognize any of these names as one of your ancestors, please, contact me.
We are also going to have a Knight family reunion, June 25th-26th for all the descendants of Davis and Sarah Knight, and we would sure love to have new distant cousins join us!
Once I have more pictures, I will create a poster for the descendants of each of Martin Lorenzo Dow's siblings, in hope to find even more cousins.

How cousin are we?

Last weekend we got the chance to go visit Brenda, my husband's 2nd cousin twice removed, whom we found through a series of events that involved also another long lost cousin, Sarah.
We  enjoyed our time so much, getting to know her, her husband and her mom, and scanning so many family pictures!
At the same time, I realized that while we all know we are cousins, and both my husband and Brenda trust me when I tell them they are 2nd cousins twice removed, it really sounds a bit confusing!
It wasn't until my husband told me that he couldn't explain to Brenda's mom how they were related, that I realized I had to make it more visual, and I promised my self and Brenda that I would do it ASAP.
So, this morning I just had to do it.
I started gathering the pictures from each generation, for each of the three lines involving Sarah, Brenda and my husband, then I uploaded them on my publishing account, and I started a new 8.5x11 page project.

Once it was done, I wondered why didn't I think of it sooner!
Each level is a generation, so you can see siblings, then cousins, then 2nd cousins, 3rd cousins and so on. Looks like my children are the farthest in the descendancy line!My husband came home and finally said that he understood the relationship with his long lost cousin, plus I received a great feedback from both of the other cousins, and I know they will enjoy showing it to other  family members on their descendancy line.
It might be interesting to notice that for each line, the cousins that were "starters" in finding each other, are on a different level. Almost as if for each generation there was one appointed to reconnect the family...
I am going to create more version of this"cousin" chart, to include each and every distant cousin we  are so grateful to be connecting to, so that when we will see each other at our family reunion, it will be so much easier to understand and remember how exactly we are related!
I can't wait!

By the way, if there are other descendants of Martin Lorenzo Dow and Julia Judenia White out there, or if anybody in this chart seems familiar, let me know, I am always looking for long lost cousins!

If you would like to learn more about the various degrees of kinship, you can give a look at this entry on the wikipedia