2012 Heritage Calendar

October is Family History month, and I am always looking for ways to help others(and myself) remember to put down their memories and/or find the stories about their family.
I talked about my idea for a Heritage calendar long time ago, but since I am creating a new one for 2012, I wanted to share this version with you.
The cover was inspired by my very colorful Family Tree:

The idea of the calendar is to inspire me to focus on collecting information about a specific couple or generation each month, so that by the end of the year there should be enough material to put together a 4 generations Family History Book.
On January I have all my children, which, by the way, on the cover are in the watering can as a symbol of their ability to give new life to the Family tree.

 February is for me and my husband (perfect, right?;).

 March is for their paternal grandparents.

 April for their  maternal grandparents.

May for their paternal great grandparents on their granddaddy's side.
June for their paternal great grandparents on their Nana's side.
July is for their maternal great grandparents on their nonno's side.
August is for their maternal great grandparents on their nonna's side.
The remaining months can be used to either display the 2nd great grandparents( 4 for each month), or to focus on uncle aunts and cousins (i.e.: September for uncle and aunts on dads side, October for uncle and aunts on mom's side, November for cousins on dad's side, December for cousins on mom's side.).

Once 2012 will be gone by, this calendar can be recycled by framing the picture part of each month  and hanging them on a special Heritage wall in your home. I would put the family tree(trim the bottom, where it has the title of the calendar)

in the center, the pages about the kids on the bottom with their parents on the side, maybe uncles and aunts and cousins further down and grand parents and great grandparents on the top, in a family tree manner. If you like you can purchase one of those cute vinyl wall family trees that you can find online, or if you feel up to it, you can paint your very own.

So, start creating this calendar, and even if you don't have all the pictures, that shouldn't stop you, it just means that this is a incentive for you to actually look for those pictures during 2012!

This calendar could be another way to entice your family members, whether their are immediate or long lost cousins, to share the info and picture that they have with you.
Who wouldn't want to be part of such a cute calendar and of a possibly even cuter Family History book?
It would also be a beautiful Christmas gift, especially for family members that don't really use the internet, to share your passion with them, and why not, plant the "genealogy seed" in their heart!

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You can get a free Publishing account by signing up at http://www.preservemyheritage.com and start creating unlimited projects at once!
Love my Creative Genealogy templates and ideas? 

My HM club members can have their favorite template transferred to their account for personal use, or  can have it completely personalized by me for them  for a reasonable fee.

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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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You can get a free Publishing account by signing up at http://www.preservemyheritage.com and start creating unlimited projects at once!
Love my Creative Genealogy templates and ideas? 

My HM club members can have their favorite template transferred to their account for personal use, or  can have it completely personalized by me for them  for a reasonable fee.

Want more for less? Check out our incredible host rewards and My Club HM!

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Creative Genealogy: the art of recycling

If you know me, you know that I just cannot stand waste.
I love been able to use everything to its full potential, and do all I can to make this happen.
In my house we recycle everything. We do compost for our garden. I garage sales or I donate items to charity or freecycle so that somebody else can use what we don't need, Most of my kids clothes are hand me downs from some family member or friends or their own brothers.
I could go on and on about my efforts to recycle, but this should give you an idea of what I am talking about.
This characteristic of mine applies also to my Creative Genealogy projects, and since HM has finally introduced the capability of importing complete pages into a project, I am in a complete recycling mode!
I have been changing formats to many of my projects, mixing different project together, and while doing this my mind has been overwhelmed by the infinite possibilities!
I have also been able to recover projects whose formats where not available anymore for printing, and change them as needed.

Another way I recycle my genealogy projects is by switching pictures on a family tree, like when I changed a tree I created for my children in the same tree but with my husband and his siblings as the root persons

or when I use different pictures of the same persons for the same family tree, just to maybe have a tree with them when they were young, and one with their latest picture.
or when I create a descendancy chart for kinship explanations for 2 different ancestors in a family tree.

   

or when I find a template created by somebody else and say "Why didn't I think of that before!" or "This is just perfect for me, why reinvent the wheel?" and I either use it as is or transform it to fit my needs.

LOVE LOVE LOVE Recycling!!!

The nice thing is, I do all this without wasting paper, glue, or any other tool traditional scrap-booking requires.
I don't risk losing my project, because it is safely stored in my Studio online , and I can publish copies or different versions of a project whenever I want, or just wait for when that format is on sale (Yeah, I love sales;)).

I already posted a couple of my "recycled" creative genealogy projects, but  stay tuned, since I have many more to come and remember to like my facebook page also for extras I don't have the time to post here!
(Yes, 4 boys age 7 and under can somehow take most of my time;)).

If you want to start recycling creatively too, join my Club HM!

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You can get a free Publishing account by signing up at http://www.preservemyheritage.com and start creating unlimited projects at once!
Love my Creative Genealogy templates and ideas? 

My HM club members can have their favorite template transferred to their account for personal use, or  can have it completely personalized by me for them  for a reasonable fee.

Want more for less? Check out our incredible host rewards and My Club HM!

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8 minutes scrap page

As another proof that using our Studio online software is just so easy, I choose a cute scrap page that seemed it would be perfect for my boys, with just a couple changes.
From my website, I looked in the Template gallery, and chose this Template:

As alway, I clicked on details, selected the premier box, and clicked on "get this template.
Once in my project and templates, I clicked on start my own, edited, and customized it.

I dragged and dropped my kids pictures,  changed the brown in red, to make it match with their clothes, and changed the wording.

In less than 8 minutes, it was done!
Take advantage of the FREE PREMIER weekend, and make your own page too!

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You can get a free Publishing account by signing up at http://www.preservemyheritage.com and start creating unlimited projects at once!
Love my Creative Genealogy templates and ideas? 

My HM club members can have their favorite template transferred to their account for personal use, or  can have it completely personalized by me for them  for a reasonable fee.

Want more for less? Check out our incredible host rewards and My Club HM!

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Importing old genealogy projects into a whole new one

I have already talked about how much I am in love with the new HM Studio functionality, the Import page, which is found  in My Studio editor inside the "My projects" tab once you click on a page from any of your projects.

I have been so excited about it, that I cannot stop transforming old projects into new ones, and/or making various versions of a new project.
I took the 14x11 Family tree posters I talked about here and transformed them in 2 24x20 canvases, changing them just a tiny bit, but putting the family names in the center of each canvas.

I took the cute little artsy 12x12 page family tree I created for my son (read about it here), and made it into 2 20x20 canvases, one with my husband as the root person, one with me as the root person.

Yeah, I am really into canvas lately;) It might be because a little bird told me that they are going to be on sale before Christmas ;)!
I am working on them now, so that when they are on sale, I will be ready to publish!

Here is a video that will explain how the import feature works:

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You can get a free Publishing account by signing up at http://www.preservemyheritage.com and start creating unlimited projects at once!
Love my Creative Genealogy templates and ideas? 

My HM club members can have their favorite Creative Genealogy template transferred to their account for personal use, or  can have it completely personalized by me for them  for a reasonable fee.

Want more for less? Check out our incredible host rewards and My Club HM!

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