Displaying Your Photographs in Albums


© Christine Sievers

Part of the fun of genealogy is to share your family story. However, most of my relatives and friends become quite glassy-eyed when I haul out my family group sheets and meticulously recorded documentation. Photograph albums can be a much more interesting way of sharing. This is the most fun and creative part of my photographic project.

I like to think of these albums as my personal version of the coffee table book. Like a coffee table book, they will not include all the pictures I've taken (for example, the 100 snapshots of my Grand Canyon trip), but the best and most representative. After all, I do not want to bore someone to death with my collection.

By now, you have gone through and filed your photographs and have a good idea what you actually have. Before you start gathering the copies you want to display in an album, do some some jotting down of the picture categories in your possession. Your collection may range from a treasure trove of ancestral pictures to a more limited accumulation of the photographs you have taken in your life. If your collection is sparse, you may want to go begging your relatives (in a nice way) for copies of their more extensive collection. You might try to bribe them with a few gems you possess that they may want a copy of.

While you are going through these older photographs, begin making one album of unidentified pictures that you can take with you to family reunions and visits to older relatives. Hopefully, this album will get smaller and smaller as they become identified and move to other albums.

Your goal is to build a library of albums. So, the next step is to start jotting down ideas of how you might divide them up. If you are lucky to have a large collection of ancestral pictures, grouping those by family branches is one way. You may have a picture of a great-great aunt or uncle, and be able to extend that album all the way to your living cousins. You might find that these cousins (particularly, the genealogical minded) would be delighted to find out that you are taking an interest in their direct family, and be willing to share photographic copies with you. Another way, is to group those older pictures chronologically, reserving one album for the 19th century. How you group these older pictures will depend one what you have.

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