Heritage Scrapbook Ideas With Or Without Photos.

Here are some heritage scrapbook ideas to honor your heritage. Scrapbooking your family heritage is a wonderful way to document for future generations everything you know about your ancestors. When family photographs are available, and are in good enough condition to use, it's fairly simple to use them in scrapbook layouts. However, if photography is hard to come by or non-existant, it's still possible to include the information you have about your family members by thinking creatively. Consider all the different items you have available that can be included in your heritage albums.

Photocopies

Good laser-printed copies of photographs can often be easier to scrapbook than the originals. They can be resized and color-corrected, and some areas of damage can be mended with the right graphics software. Best of all, these copies can often be saved to a disk or CD for later use or sharing among family members.

Documents

Whether you have originals or photocopies, documents can be included in scrapbooks, and are a delightful addition in many cases. Look for:

Birth certificates
Birth announcements
Christening invitations
Graduation announcements
Marriage announcements or certificates
Wedding invitations
Military records
Bible record pages
Newspaper articles
Census records

All of these documents can tell about a portion of your family's history. Combine them in layouts with journalling telling what you know about the particular event. If you are using original documents, be sure you de-acidify them and mount them non-permanently on acid-free papers. Often, it is simpler and safer to use high-quality laser-printed copies.

Memorabilia and Ephemera

Medals
Jewelry
Buttons
Pins
Ticket Stubs
Greeting Cards
Postcards
Maps

Basically, any items that have been passed along in the family, are found in your attic, or even those that have been aquired at thrift and antique stores can be used in your scrapbook layouts. As long as the item helps you tell the story of your family and the times in which they lived, it can be incorporated into your heritage album. If the items are small enough, use them directly on your pages, or incorporate small pockets into your layouts to hold them. If you're not a fan of dimensional pages, put the items on a scanner or photocopier and use those flat images instead. Include any information about the items you've chosen and how they relate to your family members.

Other scrapbook ideas for items to use in heritage layouts include copies of census pages, historical photos from the area in which your family lived and newspaper clippings of historical events. All of these items can be used to give a feeling of the appropriate time period when actual photos of your family are unavailable.
These heritage scrapbook ideas can give your family a peek into their ancestors' lives.