Another Time and Place: States

Sometimes it's nice to place our ancestors in the areas where they lived. Often times we have a photo that was taken in the town where they grew up but no good "setting" for it. That's when city or state themes come in handy for creating digital scrapbook pages. Unless your ancestors came from big cities that have a theme (like "the big apple" or "the windy city") you may be hard pressed to come up with a city theme. But state themes are a lot easier to create. Each of our great United States is known for something and that "something" can become the theme for your scrapbook page.

If this sounds like just the thing to you, you'll be excited about what I have to show you today. Deltapdawn of the Scrapping 'Til Dawn blog has a series of state templates going that will give you a great place to start in creating a state theme page for your photos. She started the series back in January and is still going strong. I don't know if she's planning to do all 50 states or not but I know she's taking requests. I requested a page for Michigan and she posted it on February 23rd.
You can do a search for your state of interest by entering it in the search box in the upper left corner of the page. If you don't find what you're looking for, leave her a request as a comment.

If you don't know how to make use of a template for digital scrapbooking check out this easy tutorial done by Misty on the Misty Cato blog. You can create a great looking page in minutes using a template... most of the work is done for you!

Here's an example of what I created using the Michigan template:

It took me about 40 minutes to throw this page together using Deltapdawn's template. I could have done it more quickly but it took me a while to decide on a photo and a kit to use ;-) The papers and elements are from a kit called "Bluestorm" from the Scrappy Blue Stones blog (this kit is no longer available for free but it is available for purchase here).

So, there you go. Templates can save you a lot of design time and these in particular can help set the scene of your ancestor's pictures. They would also work great for scrapping family vacation pictures!

Now go get creative with your genealogy!