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Illuminated Heritage

October 16, 2007

Ancestry Press Update

As promised, I found out the pricing for the printed bound heritage books you can make at Ancestry Press. A 24-page 8.5×11 book is $29.95 and each additional page costs 39 cents. Comparing that to Shutterfly, where I got my pet photo book, it’s a little cheaper, especially if you add pages and it’s a bit more space, since it’s a larger paper size. Mine was 8×8 inches, $29.95 for 20 pages and $1 per additional page. Of course, it’s not really apples and apples, since Ancestry Press is geared toward genealogists or family historians so it wouldn’t really work for my pet photo book!

posted by Kay at 10:03 am | Comments (0)

October 9, 2007

Your Own Book

Recently through a very nice offer from Catster and Shutterfly, I was able to create this extremely cool 8 x 8 bound book of photos of my pets. Ok, that isn’t THAT exciting to most of you, but pets are what I have and it was SO much fun too! I was really surprised how easy it was to put together my own book and I was even more surprised when I got it in the mail to find that it was a hardbound real book, not a scrapbook with printed pages slipped in page protectors (which is what I was expecting). It’s a REAL book like one you’d find in the children’s department at your library. The offer was for a free 20 page ($30 value) book with $1 for each additional page. I scoured all my photos - physical and digital - scanning in what I needed that wasn’t already digital and uploaded them to the site. Originally I was just going to do the cats as we’ve had 10 but then I thought I should definitely add the horse and then I felt bad for leaving the 3 rabbits and 3 dogs out, so I paid a little extra and included everyone. Once I decided on my “story” and the photos I wanted to include, I was able to go through with this nice little utility to layout my pages, choose backgrounds, fonts, number of photos per page, photo borders, etc. When I was pretty happy then I was able to go through and preview the entire book on one screen, which was really nice to make it flow better. A little shipping information, a click of the mouse and a week later the book was at my door! I know other photo sites offer this service, such as Kodak Gallery.

Once I got the book I brought it in to show all my friends (you want to see buzz marketing in practice, that was it!) and we came up with even more ideas on how to use these books. You could do one a year for each child as they attend school, special BIG parties (like special anniversaries, birthdays, weddings, baptisms, etc), vacations, mementos of special people, and maybe even a family history. However, when I looked I really found the tools for family history lacking - how was I going to do a family tree or something complicated like that?

Well, today I found my answer….Ancestry now offers AncestryPress which will do the same type of service with a family history angle. You have to upload your family tree to Ancestry and I’m not sure how private you can keep that, so I’ll have to look into that. Also, I have yet to see the price for this beastie and I’ve looked all around. I need to look more - but if you know, drop me a comment! Apparently you can print off a page at a time by yourself or order the whole book bound and printed. It appears that it only comes in 8.5 x 11 instead of the 8×8, 12×12 or 6×6 formats you can get elsewhere.

Something to keep in mind for Christmas presents and that should give me some time to really explore it! If you’ve already done this, drop me a comment!

posted by Kay at 10:37 am | Comments (0)

October 4, 2007

10-Day Free Access to Some US Census Data

News Flash! A “large portion” of US Census data from 1790-1920 will be going up on WorldVitalRecords in the next few days. These are not indexed, but they are browsable images. WorldVitalRecords is allowing free access to them for about 8 more days, so hop on over and start looking around!! From Dick Eastman’s blog…full story.

posted by Kay at 2:21 pm | Comments (0)

October 1, 2007

FREE Genealogy E-Books

Well, lookie what I came across today! On the Genealogy Librarians News blog they have a new “Book of the Day” feature where every day they will put up a few PDFs of entire books which you can then download and keep! Today the features are books about Brooklyn NY, Gilmaton NH and Santa Clara County CA. Be sure to subscribe in one form or another to keep up on each day’s treats! Here’s the full story.

posted by Kay at 11:29 am | Comments (0)