Book Cover - Paternal 2xGreat Grandparents

A short while ago my a distant relative created a photo book of their family history through something like Albumworks. Knowing that I was into all things family history I got invited to the morning tea "reveal" and presentation to the family. 

 It was a wonderful book with lots of great photos and stories. It was very inspiring and so I dashed home to begin putting together my own book of my Father's family. The first thing I started on was the cover. I wanted to represent each of my gt-gt-grandparents and thankfully on this side of the family I am blessed to have a photo of each and every one of them. 

My Photoshop skills are reasonable, so I fiddled around with all of these photos and the cover I designed is shown below. These are my 8 paternal great-great-grandparents. I think the men look rather dashing characters and the women's faces tell all sorts of hidden stories. They are matched with their partners and the Paternal- Paternal are on the left and the Paternal- Maternal are on the right.

Unfortunately, this is where I stalled. I found it incredibly difficult to come up with ideas for layouts and family information for individual pages. I shall have to go back and have another look at the relatives book for some more inspiration. 

I like order and consistency, but I want a book to be about more than names and dates. I have very little information about some of them, and very few photos though I have researched them all, I have trees for each and descendants lists and places where they were, and census records etc. 

Anastasia Colston is my Irish connection, her mother was Anastasia Fitzpatrick from Kilkenny, the rest are of English descent. Kinchin is my fatherline. Waite tripped me up for a long time as someone had recorded it as White. Hawkins has been a quite difficult name as it is quite common, and Horkings is only Horkings since arriving in Australia, before that, of course, being Hawkins!

Some led very interesting lives, like John Wallace and Julie Barber who travelled the world as actors and you can read about in my blog, others are normal people with normal lives that don't pop up much in the newspapers. They kept their heads down and lived good law abiding lives. 

I still want to find out more about each of them, and put something together, preferably in my father's lifetime. Perhaps if I blog about each person or couple it will help me get my ideas together :)

With all the blogging I have been doing lately there might be a book waiting in the wings after all.