caught the family history bug?
I want to introduce you to my friend, Laura Vanderbeek. Super cute, mother of two, scrapbook extraordinaire, editorial board member with Simple Scrapbooks and Digital Scrapbooking magazines ... and a cancer survivor.
Laura was diagnosed with Stage 2B Hodgkins Lymphoma when she was 30 years old. Her son was 4 weeks old, and her daughter had just turned 4. Can you imagine the shock for her and for her friends & family? During her treatment, she struggled to scrapbook, but it wasn't because she didn't want to. When you are that sick, it's just hard to do. There were weeks that she couldn't even see well enough to read or watch tv.
Laura has been in remission for 6 months now. Check out that great hair that's growing back (with some fresh highlights even!) As her strength returned, she began to scrapbook more and her focus really turned to family history scrapbooking. I don't know how many of you have caught the family history scrapbooking bug yet, but Laura's story inspires me and that's why I wanted to share it with you today.
She's got a system down for balancing it all. She has begun focusing on her Dad's side of the family first. Quite often she will create a few pages with as much information as she has and then she will email them to her Dad with a list of questions. While she's waiting for a reply, she switches her focus to scrapbooking the busy lives of her little ones. Once she receives the information back from her Dad, she completes the pages and starts the process over again.
Laura says, "As I started working on my family history pages I began to realize that it doesn't take long before the story of one's life can become completely lost, unless it gets written down. There is so much strength and insight we can gain from someone else's struggles, accomplishments, their loves, and their victories. All of my life I heard stories about my Dad's sister, Little Pat. She was beautiful and had a great sense of humor. Her junior year of high school she was Prom Queen and tied an Olympic track record ... all while she struggled with terminal cancer. She died when she was 17 and so I never got to meet her, but her story encouraged me to be strong through it all. You can bet I want my children and grandchildren to know her story and what great strength and courage she had and how she inspired me. We each have our struggles, obstacles to overcome, as well as things that inspire us and help us to thrive. My greatest hope is that the stories I share through scrapbooking, whether they are mine or that of a family member, will someday help someone else."
Here's to Laura and so many others that we know (including some of you reading this now) who inspire us to do more with our life -- such a precious, precious gift that we have. Are we doing our part to record our story, and the stories of our loved ones ... before it's too late?
Laura was diagnosed with Stage 2B Hodgkins Lymphoma when she was 30 years old. Her son was 4 weeks old, and her daughter had just turned 4. Can you imagine the shock for her and for her friends & family? During her treatment, she struggled to scrapbook, but it wasn't because she didn't want to. When you are that sick, it's just hard to do. There were weeks that she couldn't even see well enough to read or watch tv.
Laura has been in remission for 6 months now. Check out that great hair that's growing back (with some fresh highlights even!) As her strength returned, she began to scrapbook more and her focus really turned to family history scrapbooking. I don't know how many of you have caught the family history scrapbooking bug yet, but Laura's story inspires me and that's why I wanted to share it with you today.
She's got a system down for balancing it all. She has begun focusing on her Dad's side of the family first. Quite often she will create a few pages with as much information as she has and then she will email them to her Dad with a list of questions. While she's waiting for a reply, she switches her focus to scrapbooking the busy lives of her little ones. Once she receives the information back from her Dad, she completes the pages and starts the process over again.
Laura says, "As I started working on my family history pages I began to realize that it doesn't take long before the story of one's life can become completely lost, unless it gets written down. There is so much strength and insight we can gain from someone else's struggles, accomplishments, their loves, and their victories. All of my life I heard stories about my Dad's sister, Little Pat. She was beautiful and had a great sense of humor. Her junior year of high school she was Prom Queen and tied an Olympic track record ... all while she struggled with terminal cancer. She died when she was 17 and so I never got to meet her, but her story encouraged me to be strong through it all. You can bet I want my children and grandchildren to know her story and what great strength and courage she had and how she inspired me. We each have our struggles, obstacles to overcome, as well as things that inspire us and help us to thrive. My greatest hope is that the stories I share through scrapbooking, whether they are mine or that of a family member, will someday help someone else."
Here's to Laura and so many others that we know (including some of you reading this now) who inspire us to do more with our life -- such a precious, precious gift that we have. Are we doing our part to record our story, and the stories of our loved ones ... before it's too late?
at
9:28 AM
16 Comments:
I am from Puerto Rico and it has been very difficult to get hold of any family history records. There's barely a few pictures and a lot of lost stories that died when my grandparents died. I still want my kids and future generations to know where they come from, I do have 3 generations back of names but not much info or pictures. I have talk to many of my uncles and aunts but they don't remember any other family members besides their siblings an a couple of aunts. Any suggestions?
I really enjoyed this post. It was very inspiring and motivating. I have a question- how can I preserve newpaper clippings that are older ( or any newspaper clippings in general?) I know there are products out there, is archival mist a good option for such things? Thanks!Amy
Thanks for sharing! It inspires me to make the 'someday' projects into 'do them now' projects.
Amy S in ND
I just finished transcribing 40 letters written between my grandparents when they were engaged. It was so fun. I am so glad that my dad shared these with me. I hope he doesn't think he is getting them back! Now I need to go scrapbook about them too. Thanks for the inspiration and encouragement.
I have always done family history and have traced ancestors on my maternal grandmother's side back to 80 A.D. This post is a real inspiration to get as much information as I can into scrapbooks. I have to agree with Amy that my someday projects, will be now projects! :D
Very inspiring! I sent the Family History Scrapbooking book to all the women in my family for Christmas hoping to have them get the bug as well.
Laura's story is one they have heard a few times from me so this post will be sent to them too. Thanks for sharing your story Laura!
I very much agree! I hadn't thought much about heritage scrapbooking before, but a week ago my Dad was diagnosed with cancer, which of course changes everything. I've asked him to record his memories and go through pictures (to keep his mind occupied with other things) and then I am going to put them in a scrapbook. I'm praying hard that he overcomes this, and we have a wonderful heritage scrapbook to look through together; but if that is not God's plan, then we have a wonderful album of memories we might not have known otherwise. Thanks for the great post!
I truly believe it's the stories that truly matter. Words are powerful. Especially in scrapbooks.
Amazing! Isn't funny that by reading a little article found on my favorite Scrapbooker's Blog, I feel I received an answer to my prayer?! Becky ~ thanks so much for sharing Laura's inspiring story and thank you for always being an inspiration to me. :)
Wow! What an amazing story! Thanks Becky for sharing this with us. What an inspiration. I'll be praying for continued health for Laura.
I am currently gathering as much information on my family as I can. I have a treasure of old photos that I am scanning, one by one. I can't wait to start on my family scrapbook...even though I am swimming (drowning?) in information and photos. Maybe if I can just get started, things will fall into place!
Great post. Laura is remarkable - she is one of the pioneers of digital and to hear that she is now focused on family history scrapbooking is really neat. She is an amazing woman and a great example to all of us.
For the comment on preserving old newspaper clippings - Archival Mist is great - I highly recommend scanning them into your computer because you will never lose them (if you back them up.) :)
For those of you trying to gather information on your family - keep working on it - little by little you will find what you are looking for.
I have a great-great-great grandmother who came from England and crossed the plains - she lost her entire family to hardship along the way. I researched her and researched her and could only find second hand accounts of her life written by others. Years went by and then one day I was given letters written in the late 1800's by my grandmother to my great-great grandfather - it was so neat to see her handwriting, to touch what she had touched and to read her thoughts on her day to day life.
It really reminds me that our day to day things will be important to our family someday which is why we should not only scrapbook our family history but our family now...
1. Trina
2. Oregon
3. I thought of an idea for your Web site after the deadline that I still wanted to share. Selecting different fonts that look good together for a page can be challenging at times (sans serif and serif, sans and sans, etc.) and I think that a cool Web resource would be a list of font combinations that you’ve done with a hyperlink to an example.
Hi Becky, I finished 6 scrapbook copies of my side of the family's history. It turned out great. I used a lot of ideas from you family history scrapbooks. I plan to start my husband's side of the family soon. I was wondering if you have any good ideas for incorporating several written pages for one person's history. My mother-in-law has written several pages for several people. We actually do not have a lot of pictures to go with some of them. I had thought about putting them in a envelope close to the top, inside of a page protector with a tab on them to pull out to read. I am not really crazy about doing that because I don't want my pages to get torn up when people put information back in page or also, I didn't want finger prints all over pages. Any advice would be great. Thanks, Cathy
Becky,
Thanks for sharing. That is a clear example of what Scrapbooking is all about.
Lisa
Wow, what a super cute friend you have. I am inspired that she kept up with scrapbooking through her treatments. How remarkable. I was surprised to see the small town of Bloomfield on that page. I have distant relatives that live there.
Teri
Post a Comment
<< Home