Genealogy, Scrapbooking and Storage

I have a question for each of you! Who is into Genealogy and what do you do with all those photos and other vital records? Do you create scrapbooks with some of the photos? I would love for you to share your ideas.

I'm on facebook and follow Scraptherapy. Jody lynn does some wonderful scrap pages and albums and is always willing to share. I encourage any of you interested to visit her on facebook. Be sure to check out all of her photos. I somewhere along the line had seen some of her genealogy pages she had put together and have been a fan of her FB site ever since. The link below will get you to her pages.

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=383401289508&set=a.383400314508.161395.89067619508#!/pages/Nashville-TN/Scraptherapy/89067619508?v=wall

Anyway, I asked if she would mind if I shared some of her ideas and she was very gracious and willing to share. Above is a set of drawers that are metal. She painted them and added the papers to the outside. I know you can get similar flat drawers in plastic and thought this is a treatment that would work great so they didn't look like the generic plastic drawers. Line the drawers with pretty papers that face the outside or paste/decoupage papers to the outside of the drawers. If you are storing Christmas themed papers, ephemera or embellishments in one drawer, use Christmas looking paper so you will know at a glance that is the 'go to' drawer for decorating a Christmas themed page. Likewise, if you sort by color, simply use papers the color of those items stored inside. Use the paper to remind you what is in the drawer. Another option is to use papers as a decorative element in your studio and label the drawerss to indicate what's in them. Don't you agree the paper is so much interesting than plain plastic?

Below she is using the old wooden pants hangers to hold some of her booklets and other papers. I have used these to hold fabrics also. It keeps them easily accessible.

Here she has used old spools to wrap her trims onto. They are not only more visible this way, they are also pretty. You can tell at a glance when something needs replaced.

I haven't really gotten into scrapbooking...yet, but I'm on the verge. I had purchased this awesome book on scrapbooking your family history. It's titled Ancestry Art by Karen Foster Design. There are some great ideas and lots of inspiration between the covers. The ISBN is 0-9753703-051699. I would suggest this to anyone interested in genealogy and/or scrapbooking.

I have also purchased a few papers and embellishments with plans to do some projects in this book and incorporate some of the ideas shown in Scraptherapy.

I guess I haven't shared what I do with my photos. I have spent the last year or so scanning the photos and documents into my computer. They are stored on an external hard drive and separated by family name using my grandparents' names and my husband's grandparents' names. I have folders within these folders using their parent's and other ancestor's names. I have also created a folder for my husband and I for all of our photos and our childrens' and grandchildrens photos. After I scanned the photos and documents, I put them in a tall, narrow set of drawers, separated the same way. It is much easier to search through my computer files than all those hard copies of photos!

Somehow I got sidetracked with Crazy Quilting, and have also been doing paintings of relevant family homes and other things. I am now beginning to print these onto printable fabric sheets and will be incorporating them into the Crazy Quilt pieces. It seems to me that CQ is like scrapbooking, but on fabric. There just aren't enough hours in the day for me to do all that I am inspired to do! Storing is crazy no matter what you get into, figuring out how to store all those supplies. I hope this post has given you some ideas and I really, really hope you will take a few minutes to share some of your ideas!!!