If you use genealogy software, you probably know that some genealogy programs can take your data (birth and death dates, children, etc.) and turn it into sentences and paragraphs. While that's kind of cool, the result doesn't make for compelling reading. However, it can give you a starting point for a family history book.
Although our client wasn't interested in completely rewriting the narrative report into story form, he did want to add some details and make the report more visually appealing. He came to us with the report, a few additional stories, and some photos and documents. Here are some highlights from the finished product.
We began the book with a pictorial introduction to his family.
A custom-designed picture pedigree makes it easy to see how everyone is related.
Although the generated narrative (first paragraph) is in the form of sentences, it isn't poetry. However, adding obituary text and photos gave a more interesting picture of the ancestor's life.
The center section of the book contains a family timeline.
Steve centered the book around his grandparents (pictured on the cover), who were grocers in Iowa. Fortunately, he had a lot of photographs and stories about his grandparents that made them come to life. We used a brown paper grocery bag as the background texture in this section of the book.
He commissioned charming sketches of the Koellner grocery stores and residences from a local artist.
The final section of the book is about the current generations of the Koellner family.
Designing the cover is usually the last step before publication. For this cover, we used the only extant photo of them as a couple, placing it in front of a photo of their first home. A bit of red gives some oomph to the black and white photographs.
