Bringing Genealogy to Life
By Bettyanne Bruin

If your ancestor is nothing more than a name and a date on a page, it might be time to give your great, great grandmother or grandfather, aunt, uncle or cousin a life.

Thanks to Scrapbooking Accuracy Expert (SAE), Laura Best, the toughest part of accurate visual research has been done for you — from defining the hundreds of specific historical occupations to matching correct dyes to specific styles from each time period, so each ancestor becomes just as real as if they were telling their story to you firsthand.  

Since the age of 12, Laura has dug through drawers, mailed letters to relatives, scanned microfilms and requested documents, all in the name of finding another family ancestor. But, while doing her research, her mind kept wandering and expanding to wanting to know, not only the names, dates and places of her ancestors, but the correct events, styles, colors, stories and other visual depictions to make sure each ancestor was represented correctly from the time period in which he or she lived.

“I wasn’t satisfied with just having facts. I wanted to see their lives; who they were and how their life may have influenced mine,” says Best, who has spoken nationwide regarding her findings and the many books she has authored covering the many aspects of historical accuracy.  

Following years of writing countless travel, food and children’s fiction articles, Laura went to work for Chapelle, an imprint of Sterling Books, where she convinced them to do a book on genealogy.

“These were pure New Yorkers — suits and all — so selling a book on genealogy was somewhat of a hard sell at the time, but the results, for them, have been surprising,” she said. Her first book, Genealogy for the First Time, has been celebrated throughout the world, particularly in Australia, where it received rave reviews, including a starred review in the Library Journal.

Her success with Genealogy for the First Time led to the publication of her next book,

Scrapbooking Your Family History, which offers tips for flushing out your ancestor’s life factors — from photo identification, to old country traditions, to how to create true-to-life pages. This book was Book of the Month in Australia and has received such reviews as, “Genealogist Laura Best helps you to transform family history into a scrapbook that will be treasured by all generations.” (goldviolin.com)

Scrapbooking Family in Historical Events followed. This book shows how to scrapbook your family in relation to authentic historical events. A workbook followed that features tear-away pages that offer vintage images found at antique stores, estate sales and other outlets, with a CD included, to be used in paper crafting, scrapbooking and fabric transfers.

Her upcoming book, Memories in Time: Family History, shows how to chronologically fit an ancestor’s life into a historical timeline to find and then use all of the events that took place during each time period.

And, Scrapbooking Historic Occupations focuses on countless historical occupations — from a sash and doorman to a shoemaker and a cobbler. “Most people don’t know the difference between a shoemaker and a cobbler,” says Laura, “but each of these craftsmen would be offended if they were to be wrongly referred to as one instead of the other.” (A shoemaker mass produces shoes while a cobbler hand makes each one.)

“What all this means is that scrapbooking is not just about preservation, but about preserving all of your research in the most visually accurate way.”

Wanting to make the task of scrapbooking one’s family history easier, Laura not only studied occupations and timelines, but also colors that were popular and/or available during each specific time period. She also succeeded in helping scrapbookers narrow down a specific time period by identifying popular styles.

In addition to all of her research, Laura also created a way to recreate a life, where not a lot is known about that person, by incorporating general happenings during each specific period, with generalized old-fashioned photos from that time, which can be paired up with an ancestor’s story or simple life facts.

This process says Laura, not only helps record an ancestor’s life accurately, but can also help descendants remember each ancestor easier through effective visual recall. “Again, instead of just a name, date and place, now a person can say, ‘Isn’t that the grandma who owned one of the first sewing machines,” because that ancestor has now been visually depicted on the page with the exact sewing machine known for being invented during the early 1800’s with all of the correct accent colors to go along with it.

Says Laura, “I love scrapbooking just as much as the next person, but the only difference is, I find a lot more enjoyment knowing my own ancestors, and now other people’s ancestors, are each represented correctly.”

For more on Laura Best, visit www.echoroad.com.

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