Family History Visuals

 Before-and-after images of work for a personal history project now in process.  First up, a composite of two maps from 1911 and one from 1932 (each of the source images is in a different orientation and at a different scale).  The main item of interest is a home that is on the edge of one of the maps on the left.  This home is near the center of the finished image.  The school is also of interest, and I brought in the 1932 outline of the school because the new parts of the building were added just a few years after the 1911 map was made:

Next: the home is still standing, but the view from the street is obscured by trees, so I made a simple sketch with no trees showing:

 

Family History Graphic

I put this together for my extended family.  We grew up hearing about how Grandpa Don built airplanes during the war, and this shows exactly where it happened and some of what it looked like.  It started when I tried looking up "Weeks Ave." after I came across the photo of the house; it turns out that the street no longer exists.  So instead I found a map of San Diego from just before the war (the map is from 1940), and the rest came together from there.  

Postscript: Consolidated merged with Vultee in 1943 and became Convair, which was bough by General Dynamics in the 1950s, which was bought in turn by McDonnell Douglas in the early 1990s.  McDonnell Douglas closed all manufacturing operations in San Diego by the mid-1990s, and Lindbergh Field is now the San Diego International Airport.  All the old buildings are long gone, but you can still see artifacts from the 1940s on display at the San Diego Air & Space Museum in Balboa Park, including a fully restored PBY.

Personal History (the rest)

As noted in this earlier post, I started a regular job while in the thick of doing a personal history.

And now it's done: adding a few dozen evenings and weekends to the mix has resulted in nearly 150 more pages, front and back covers, all final proofing and editing, and a very happy customer (she is happy with both the substance and the timing; the digital content made it to the printer in time for her to get finished copies to giver to her family as Christmas gifts).

Even though I based the formatting on what I had developed for an earlier book, this just-finished book was made as a a glossy paperback with perfect binding (rather than a stitched hardback with endpapers).

In total, the book has over 80,000 words spread over 17 chapters and complimented by over 650 pictures.

(An image with tiny thumbnails of the middle 100 pages is past the break.)

Personal History (first third)

Time to break a long drought in postings, not with a finished product, but with a snapshot of the reason for the drought: ongoing work on my last big freelance job.  I committed to it before starting full time with Novatek (see below), and I've been working on it in fits and starts ever since.

To date, squeezing in a few hours at a time has totaled in 108 finished pages (the first 100 shown to the right in miniature; a mix of fully-formatted text and just short of 300 pictures).  I've used the same basic layout that is shown here, and hope to be done before summer is over...

Simple Heritage Chart

 In progress. 

A quick layout showing four generations for each half of a recently married couple.  A little too simple or basic to stand alone, but I'm not sure what I'll do to complete it.  Maybe add ancestor pictures, maybe add a map, maybe add another generation... Note that the names are not blurred on the original.

Family Reunion Invitation

An invitation printed two-to-a-page for a biennial reunion, with a "historic photo" of the root family at the top.  In the original photo, the family was arranged in more of a tall pyramid shape, so it took some masking and cloning work to get the result shown.

Also including a screen capture from within the program used to make the invite (Fireworks CS4), to give an idea of the number of elements used to create the finished product.

  

Family Calendar, etc.

Tabloid-sized print with all birthday information on one side and a montage of all family members on the other.  I also produced a single-sheet summary of all family contact info as part of the project.

This was commissioned for a great-grandmother with 17 biological and adopted children and nearly three dozen grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  Copies were sent to all the adult children in the family.

Completing the project required extensive collaboration in order to collect and organize four generations worth of names, dates, and photos.

Family Cards

Forty laminated credit card-sized pictures with initials and color-coordinated backgrounds (more on the color scheme below).

These were made to help keep track of who's who on both sides of the family, but they have been used in many other ways, too.  The letters are good for learning the alphabet, the family groupings allow games of Go Fish, and there are many different ways to rearrange by type (to see which side of the family has more members, to see if there are more boys than girls overall, to see how many people wear glasses, etc.).

Colors indicate relationships (all cousins have a blue background, for example), and the letters are placed to show maternal or paternal relationship (letters for people on the father's side are on the left, those for the mother's side on the right, as below).

Family Contact Info Sheet

A single-sheet summary of the addresses, phone numbers, and birthdays of 18 people in six households.  The overall dimensions are just right for printing on 8 by 10 photo paper, making it easy to get a high-quality hard copy from the digital file.

Note that the information shown has been scrambled and fictionalized (even images are not of the people that appear in the original).

Cemetery Guidebook

A 52-page guide to the burial places of four generations of client's ancestry. Project included researching burial locations, on-site photography, creating a comprehensive organizational system, and of course the layout and formatting of all materials.  I also got it placed in the FamilySearch Digital Library/Catalog for permanent online availability. (Note that you'll need a FamilySearch login to get access to the full version and that I updated this 2010 version in 2014.) 

Significant features:

• Full-bleed maps of the region in which each cemetery is located (with addresses, hours, and contact information for regional resources such as museums and family history centers).
• Full-bleed aerials of each cemetery (with GPS coordinates and burial sites markers).
• Ground-level photographs of each gravesite, accompanied by map and portrait insets.
• Life outlines for each ancestor.

Set of Brochures and Flyers

Some marketing materials:

• On the left: my rates for creating a digital manuscript of a family or personal history.
• In the middle: the kind of digitization that I can do.
• On the right: a combination brochure and order form for custom calendars (the full PDF of this document is linked below, and finished calendar examples can be seen here and here).

   

Hardbound Personal History

A 402-page personal history covering client's life from the 1940s to the date of publication. Project included extensive copy editing, the creation and/or improvement of hundreds of images and tables, and all layout and formatting.

Significant features:

• Full-bleed cover and endpapers.
• Cross-country collaboration with client and printer for the full duration of the project.
• Research and special organization of ancestry section.