My favorite way to spend a day -- when I get to take something boring and turn it into something beautiful. So when we got a call from this client, who lives on quaint Fisher's Island, New York, we were excited about the challenge she offered.
Our client had hired a professional genealogical researcher to research her family lines. As far as I could tell, the data was sound and the researcher had done a great job of sleuthing out some interesting facts. But the research was presented to the client in a series of word files with a few photocopied documents attached. Great stuff, but not so much to look at.
So, using the original reports as narrative, we found a number of public domain maps and photographs to add some visual interest. Our client dug up some great old family photos and we requested high-resolution files of the original documents from the researcher. (We also found a number of them on Ancestry and FamilySearch, also high-res.) We imported the data into charts to make them more readable and attractive. On the cover, we used a beautiful original painting done by a family member who was the "starting point" of the research.
Voila! A gorgeous oversized coffee table book that our client gave as gifts to other family members. It was a fun project for us and I learned some fascinating history of the Acadians to boot!
The cover image was an original painting by an ancestor.
A preface, written by our client about her research journey, was added to the beginning of the book along with a family photo.
We added a number of beautiful old maps to complement the data.
Some genealogical documents are more visually interesting than others...this one was quite beautiful.
We included a number of old paintings (in the public domain) that depicted what life was like in the referenced time and place.
Dates and facts were put into attractive tables for easier reading.
These paintings depict the expulsion of French Canadians from northern Canada (modern-day New Brunswick & Nova Scotia) in the mid-eighteenth century. It was a fascinating history and one that was, fortunately for the book, well-documented in art.
Our client's ancestor, "Tante Blanche," is honored among Acadians for her heroic deeds during a famine of 1797. There is a museum dedicated to her in Maine.
