Blogtoberfest, day 17 - Creating A Family Heirloom

We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies.
                                                                                                      ~Shirley Abbott

I think many of us have thought about putting together family photos in an album, along with some history, and pass this along to keep in the family as an heirloom.  Believe me when I say I've thought about this for many years.  I once worked for Hallmark, as a part time employee.  Seeing many items that we sold in the store was like being a kid in a candy store.  For awhile, we were selling an album that was not your standard 12 x 12 inch albums that many scrapbook people use.  Instead, this was like the old kind of albums that were 12 x 16 inches, but everything in it was archival and I just loved how they looked...

With my employee discount and then waiting until some of them went on clearance, I was able to purchase 4 identical albums.  I kept thinking that maybe some day I would do one up for each of the boys and for Mr. Cottage and myself.  I put the albums away in a closet and forgot about them for many years.  Then in June, 2007, my mother died rather unexpectedly.  All of a sudden, I had no other immediate family members other than our own boys.  We went away to Florida and when we came back in April, I began what turned out to be a massive undertaking.

Keep in mind that I knew nothing about scrapbooking.  I had never done it before.  I wanted this to be a lovely heirloom and as I walked around Michael's, I found and bought Family History Scrapbooking by Becky Higgins.  Because all scrapbook paper comes 12 x 12 inches, I had to be creative in finishing my pages to look nice.  I also had to glue each scrapbook paper to the album page.  I started the book using a genealogy chart...

On the pages with our older ancestors, I glued black or dark paper for the background...

Look closely and you'll notice the two different printed papers is used, but joined them together with a ribbon glued in place...

 

I also tried to use envelopes and tags to add more interest and to tell more about the person...

Here's Mr. Cottage with his mother and as a cute toddler...

For my father's family, I went back to using the black and dark papers again...

I had to have photos of my father clowning around...

Fortunately, I had lots of original papers.  I made copies for all four albums...

This particular one is held in place with a pocket I made of corresponding paper and a ribbon held in place with Velcro...

I made a copy of the original book that my father had and made a couple copies of some of the pages.  The photo of the book is glued around the top, left side and bottom and the sheets of paper with addresses can easily slip into the book...

Here I made a pocket using plastic velum and glued his unit's photo to the front of it...

I had a lot of papers I wanted to include in this, so I made an envelope with velum and used Velcro to keep the flaps closed.  You can see that my father's wishes were granted and he's was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery...

I thought this was an important part of my father's life and wanted to include this certificate, along with the photo of President Reagan that he took while at the White House.  Again, I made 4 copies of this certificate to put into all the albums.

I decided to work on all four albums at the same time.  As I did a certain page in one, I did the same page in the other three and then moved onto another page.  I'll continue this with tomorrows posting, so make sure you come back to get more ideas.