About SilverGenes Family Books
SilverGenes Family Books began with ancestry and culture in mind. It offers complete book templates as well as backgrounds, frames, and embellishments with a common theme. The products were designed primarily for use in creating family heritage and genealogy books, travel diaries, and keepsake books. All of them play nicely with self-publishing services like Viovio, Mixbook, Blurb, and iPhoto books.
Why is SilverGenes Family Books different?
A lot of research and attention to detail has gone into each book template, kit, and collection. In the beginning, this was a project for my own family and, as I progressed, I realized almost every family shares more than one ancestry. We also have a mix of personalities. Creating templates that enable us to celebrate this is important. There also needed to be a place to record family stories and important information. With all these things in mind, the work began.
For instance:
- The Irish collection features papers that display entire fairy stories in both English and Irish.
- The sheet music is real and has been digitally produced to resemble old paper.
- The Irish lace is true to an authentic 19th century pattern.
- Scottish tartans are digitally woven according to the information maintained by the National Records of Scotland. The colours and threadcounts have been faithfully reproduced.
How would you use it?
You most likely arrived here because you are looking for ideas to organize your family photos, children’s art, old family recipes and other bits and pieces stashed away in boxes. Can you imagine looking at a book made by your great-great grandparents about everyday life? Imagine drawings, garden notes, recipes, and just daily thoughts. What a treasure that would be! Family history like this can start with us, today. Your grandchildren and great-grandchildren will have a peek into life at the beginning of the 21st century.
Here are some ideas of how to bring those memories out of the boxes:
- Make a family history book. Use backgrounds and template pages designed for the era. Include notes with your photos, jot down the stories you remember. Your children and grandchildren will be glad you did.
- Celebrate your children’s school years and include scanned report cards (or not), teacher’s notes you want to remember, scanned artwork, special awards, and lots of photos of growing up.
- Assemble a cookbook. It can be old family recipes, kids’ recipes, vegetarian or vegan recipes – whatever you like. Feature the food and the people against different backgrounds. Be creative and have it printed for yourself or sell it online.
- Gardening books are a wonderful way to keep records of what you grow and harvest. Keeping notes and taking lots of photos will come in handy in years to come. It makes a nice addition to a recipe book. See how the ideas grow?
- Travel and vacation books, with all your best photos and your personal journal are another way to use these templates.
- Use various patterns as photo mats. Just print them off on your photo printer and that’s it.
I’d love to know about your project and how you use the pages and templates here. It would be wonderful to have a gallery of work to inspire others so please do send me a photo and I’ll be happy to post it.
If you have questions, just contact me and I’ll do my best to help.