A genealogist's reflection on Valentine's day

Love is in the air...
This morning my boys went to school all happy because they were going to exchange their valentines with their friends at school.
Due to some health problems we have not been able to do anything fancy this year, so they just wrote on some hand trimmed card stock hearts I made for them.
While I do not enjoy the consumist aspect of Valentine's day, I do like having an extra excuse to do something nice for someone I love.
The tradition I have started a few months ago to have a different family tree background for our magnetic family tree has come in handy in a period in which all that we are really focusing on is recovering from our health issues.

I just had to change the back ground to the heart shaped tree, and then I picked the books we had made a couple years ago about the reasons we love each other.

We are thinking  to read them tonight, after the kids go to bed, or even better, we will read them to our children as their night night story.
What better way to tell your children that you love them than to show them that you love your spouse, and why? I feel so blessed for the Love in my life...

Sometimes I find myself thinking twice before posting a happy Valentine's day wish on somebody's facebook  wall, or just uttering those words to anyone whose story I don't completely know. I am always worried about possibly hurting somebody's feelings.
I know that not everyone has a Valentine, and I know that some are really hurting about it, maybe they lost their loved one, maybe they haven't found the one yet, maybe they are just coming out of a bad experience, and this is possibly the worst day of the year for them.

If any of you is reading this post, I would love to share this thought that came to my mind while I was looking at my Valentine family tree.

We are all the fruit of Love, and as such we are all entitled to celebrate Love today, and everyday.

We come from an Heritage of Love. Because 2 people fell in love, we were born.
Even if you grew up in a orphanage, and think that you are a mistake for your parents, even if you think there was no love there, let me tell you, you are still the fruit of love.
It might have skipped a generation, you might find it in your grandparents, even if you will never know them in this life, you are still the fruit of their love.
Because they fell in love, and their child gave birth to you, you are the fruit of their love.

As  you can see, you can choose to be hurt on Valentine's day, or you can choose to celebrate.
I am thankful for the Love that brought each and everyone of my ancestors together, and  I hope and pray to continue this heritage of Love through my children, grandchildren and all of my descendants.

So, if you think you have nobody to celebrate Valentine's day with, how about you spend it with the ones that came before you?

You can call your parents, your aunt, or anybody that could tell you a little more about someone in your family line, and make today the day that you add one more person to love in your family tree, or one more reason to love that family member you want to know more about.

You can look for a blog or facebook group for your family surname, or you can create it, if you don't find it.

You can follow my example and tell the story of your Love to your children tonight.

You can write your story, because remember, LOVE is in your DNA.


The choice is yours!
Happy Valentine's day!

3 generations of Love Template

I was just looking into the template Gallery, and I found this cute three generations of Love canvas Template.

It made me think of my mom and her mom, and I thought this canvas template would be perfect to honor them.
It took me only 5 minutes to switch the pictures and change a couple things, and I am now really in love with the result.

I am my nonna Michelina's namesake, and I am pretty proud of it... I had been wanting to do something that was specific to me and her, but life has been taking its toll, and didn't quite find the time to make it from scratch, so I am very grateful for this template!
I lost my grandma to stomach cancer when I was 12. It was so heartbreaking seeing her go through all that suffering... I was with her when she passed away, and the memory is still vivid nowadays...
I miss her very much, especially now, during Christmas time, because we used to all go to her house, and enjoy our time together...

I hope this template will help many of you remembering and honoring your grandparents.

May you have a Christmas full of good old memories to remember and new beautiful ones to create.

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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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4x8 family circles tree card

I was working on last minute gifts and I just couldn't resist but making a family tree out of the 4x8 photocard format.
I also had been wanting to make a family tree out of simple circles, and I did.
Here is the final result:

This is a cute little gift that I can give not only to my husband, but also each of my kids, and it will cost me less than $1 each!^_^
I like it so much that it has become my facebook profile picture!

My husband is also getting this cute calendar, to display on his desk at the office:

I am debating if I want to put them back to back and laminate them, or just give them to him separately...
Either way, He's going to love them!
This would make a  cute little gift to have at each table at the family reunion dinner, or for each member of your family. If you don't have the pictures, you can just use the names, and maybe birth dates, and they will look great 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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Is facebook the only source your future generations will rely on?!

image source: shoebox.com 
This vignette is fun and sad at the same time, but it inspired me to a few reflections...
Today we find ourselves struggling to find info about our ancestors; each and every little bit we find is extremely valuable to us. We look at pictures and we wonder where they were taken, unless we are lucky enough to find info on the back of it, or to have a family member that remembers the story behind it. We try to understand who our ancestors were through the pictures, through their heirlooms, if lucky, through their diaries...
Still, it always feel like we don't have enough information.
Will our descendants feel the same about us?
Many of us share pictures and stories through facebook, blogs and other social networks, but how many of these pictures and stories tell who we  really are?

By the time our descendants will come along, there will be so much information that they might actually get overwhelmed if not bored in the end and not be so interested in our story after all.
Even if they are really eager to know more about their ancestors, and will go through our whole facebook account, what will they find? Thousands of links shared? Copy and paste of other people's status? Games played? A gazillion pictures?
Which of these incredible amount of data will  really tell what we think?
How will they know what was really important to us? How will they learn from our experiences?
How will they know our testimony?

Even in the cyber era, a book will be the true and tested means to pass our heritage on.
When our children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and their descendants will find and go through it, they will understand that if we took the time to put it together, it must have really been important to us.
Whether it is a  hardbound book you publish once a year or every 5 years,  a scrapbook with pages to update from time to time, whether it is a collection of your traditions, of your recipes, of your achievements, of your very own spiritual thoughts, or all of these and  more, I urge you to start writing your personal story, and  take a few minutes every week to describe at least the most important pictures of your life so that your descendants will not have to rely on the cyberspace to know who you are.

Gingerbread Christmas card template

Every now and then among the thousands of already beautiful templates available in the Template gallery on my website, I happen to find one that is just too gorgeous not to share.
This Christmas card is one of them:

I just love it!
I love the colors, I love the style, and I love that has the space to write a full Christmas letter!
This is a 7x5 Greeting Card, Template ID: 74266.
You can give a better look at it here. 
How about a supercute matching address label?

Template ID #63375
These are  premier Template, so you will need PREMIER to edit them.
Contact me to ask how you can get a FREE month of PREMIER and you will be able to create this wonderful Christmas letter/card in no time!
And remember, these templates are fully modifiable, so if you need more pictures, you can add them, re-size them, change embellishments, background and add as much text as you like!
If you want to save when you order this cards, you need to have them ready to ship before the 20% off cards offer ends, at the end of November.

 This are the holiday deadlines for publishing and ordering your projects in time for Christmas:

Family heirlooms in a virtual Shadow box

If you have one or more family heirloom, you are one lucky person! Family heirlooms can be any object left from any of your ancestors whether they have been passed down from generation to generation or you plan on passing down to your children.
One characteristic of family heirlooms, though, is that they are unique, so it is impossible to pass the same object to each and anyone of your descendants.
While this is true, there is something that can be done. You can take pictures of the family heirlooms you own, and put them together in a virtual shadow box, that you will be able to share with any other member of your family.
I think this would be a great Family reunion idea.
Each member of the extended family can take pictures of the family heirlooms they own, and they can be shared with everybody else, so that the person in charge can create one or more shadow boxes that will be available for each family member.
One great and private way to do it, is to have a "Family Reunion"  free account on www.preservemyheritage.com and have everyone upload their pictures online, so they don't have to stress in case they forget to bring them at the family reunion. You just give each relative  login and password, and everybody can have access to it, or anyone can have their own personal account, and then share the pictures with everyone else they desire to share them with.
If you look in the template Gallery, you will find quite a  few shadow boxes ideas, like these ones:

Now, the persons that created these shadow boxes, created them mostly to display pictures of people, but I really think they would really fulfill their purpose with actual family heirlooms.
In each shadow box, there could be the picture of the family that owns the heirloom(s), a picture of the original owner, and a picture (or more) of the object.
If this shadow box is intended to be part of a whole "Family Heirloom" Post bound album", then a second page can be created with the memories connected with those family heirlooms.

This would be surely a priceless heirloom in itself that can be "multiplied" for as many members of the family as there are that would love to have it, since you can just make copies of each page and of the post bound album.
This is my first attempt at a family heirloom shadow box:

In case the image above is too small, here is a detail:

I just realized that I have quite a few more family heirlooms that I can display like this...
Taking pictures of your family heirlooms will help your descendants better understand who you are, and what really mattered to you. Start your shadow box today!

Tip: As many of us gather at the grandparent's house this thanksgiving, why not ask your loved ones to show off their heirlooms and offer to take pictures of them to put in a scrap page or a book with the story behind them? If the family members that are coming prefer not to take their heirlooms out of the house, they can just bring or email a picture and share the story with everybody.
What a better way to celebrate the people we are thankful for than preserve their memories!

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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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A facebook family history story

God bless facebook!
Why this exclamation, you might ask;
Well, I have many reasons, and some of them include:
1) Living on the other side of the ocean from my homeland, I have been able to keep in touch with my family and friend.
2) I have found long lost friends from school
3) Through the creation of last name facebook groups and hometown related facebook groups, I have been able to connect to many distant cousins that I would have never found otherwise
4) It allows me to share pictures with my family and friends in a user friendly way.
5) It has been the means through which I got back in touch with a few of my cousins in Italy.
This last point is what is making me jump for joy right now because I have finally been able to have all the pictures and birth dates of the descendants of my maternal grandparents.
Here is the story.
I left Italy for the USA in 2003, and already hadn't seen this cousin of mine for a while as she had left for the North of Italy a few years before, and when she would come to visit her family in my town, she would stay too little for us to get together, so once I left for America, we totally lost track of each other.
Even if I came back to visit a few times, it was never when she was there.
After years and months of patient waiting for her or her siblings to join facebook, it finally happened last year, it was actually her nephew first, and then his father.It took one more year for me to come to the point where I was finally able to get in touch with the one cousin I had been wanting to talk to for more than 10 years!

The first time I asked her nephew for her email address, even if she had one, it was not a working one, so she never responded to the emails I sent her because she never got them!
I also created a facebook group for the descendants of our common grandparents, but that wasn't moving the waters fast enough.
Finally last week I decided to ask again as I was finishing the 2012 calendar for my mom, and the only pictures missing were the ones of this cousin and her sister's family. Luckily her sister had joined facebook the week before, so it was a matter of asking for her FB friendship, and she already had her family pictures posted on facebook.
This one cousin, the one that I really wanted to find, the one that we had so many things in common, and who was born only 11 days before me, as it turns out, she really doesn't like facebook, but fate (or should I say Somebody up there) wanted that her husband had been working in Brazil since September, so they were using Skype to communicate.
Can you imagine me as soon as my cousin's nephew gave me her Skype username?
I was on Skype in 2 seconds!
I sent her a message, the next day she answered, and finally a day later, we were having an hour plus long video chat talking like these 10 years never went by!
But the pictures, no, she didn't have them on her computer, so she got me in touch with her husband and finally,  TONIGHT, he sent me his family pictures!!!

Yeah!!! It's complete!!! I can publish the calendar for my mom (and mine too)

 (Sorry, cannot show the pages inside the calendar to respect her privacy)

 and then, after I get a little of my cousin's family stories, I can complete the descendants book I have been working on too!

Now you can understand why I love facebook so much(starting today Skype too;)).
While sometimes it can get people frustrated, I really believe that facebook has done so much for genealogy and the more people  realize how to use it in its full potential, especially using groups for people with the same last name, or that come from the same town, the more long lost cousins will be connected.

Do you have a facebook family history story?

I am a child of God

I am a child of God, and he has sent me here, has given me an earthly home with parents kind and dear...
I just love this hymn, and so do my children.
It can be appreciated at any age, as it is my belief that we are all indeed children of our Father in Heaven.
I love it so much that I have been captured for a few hours playing with my kids pictures and some of my friend's little girl pictures, around those beautiful words.
Here is the fruit of my work:

Before I show you more, I need to shout a huge THANK YOU to my good friend Becki that has allowed me to use the beautiful pictures she has taken of her gorgeous little girl for these projects, as my boys really wouldn't look so good in "pink";).
Now we can continue...

These can be printed on a 5x7 or 4x6 as birth announcement, or framed and hung in the nursery.

(isn't she just adorable? You can understand why I couldn't stop making more and more of these!)
I also decided to make them in Italian:

 but then I was like "Why not in Spanish?"

 and then French seemed just perfect for this one:

These are so cute they would look stunning on a canvas too!
Ok, I will stop (for now)^_^
Thinking of someone you would love to give these to as a gift? I can help!

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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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