As many of you know, I have spent a good portion of my spare time over the last 6 months doing research on Caroline’s and my family history. I’ve enjoyed this so much and discovered many interesting things that would have otherwise remained unknown to me. This project has been exciting because it involves many things I love, like my family, research, travel, software, visualizations, story telling, graphic design and layout, and more. I’ve used www.blurb.com for 4 years now to produce annual family albums as a print on demand service and am looking forward to using it to produce an extensive book on our families history.
I’ve also discovered an amazing new service called www.kirtasbooks.com. They have access to around 1,000,000 out of print copyright free publications that they can print on demand. I’ve been able to find and have printed books from the 1800’s that would have cost $100 to $400 for original copies but instead only cost $20 each. Wow! Gutenberg would have been blow away. I ordered 4 books from them at Christmas and I am amazed by the quality of their product that I received. They actually had somebody pull the book from the shelf at the New York Library, scan the entire book (on one of the proprietary machines they sell) and then print, bind (hardback no less) and ship it to me in less than 3 weeks. I’ll post some pics of the end result of their work later.
Below are a couple of the more interesting visualizations I have produced thus far.
This one is from myCanvas.com and is linked directly from Ancestry.com. Over all, the entire process was extremely easy and straight froward.
The next visualization uses a couple additional pieces of software that also integrate with www.ancestry.com. You’ll need to buy Family Tree Maker 2010 and Charting Companion for Family Tree Maker in order to pull this one off. I had to bring my fan and Caroline’s Fan chart both into Photoshop and combine them there in order to get this chart to look the way it does. This should obviously be an option in the software.
