Adoption Life Book Event
Hello SFCA Friends:
There will be a special information event about publishing Life Books (and other kinds of memory books) with Sally Cleland of Regina on March 13 at 7 pm. (Please try to arrive by 6:50 so we can get started on time.) We’ll meet until 9 pm in a board room of the Adoption Support Centre of Sask, 233 4th Ave. S. (kitty corner from the Radisson Hotel) on the 2nd floor. Please let me know as soon as possible if you’re interested in attending. You may email me here.
Sally will be sharing her expertise in self-publishing books about life events and history. Here is some background on the kind of projects she’s been doing, with an emphasis on publishing books about adoption:
No matter what story we want to tell i.e. our “love story”, our parent’s wedding story, the story of our 100 year-old church, the stories of our lives need to be documented. None more so than the stories we write on behalf of others who for various reasons may not be able to tell their own stories – perhaps they are too young to tell the story or perhaps they do not know the particulars of the story. Such could be the case for children who are adopted. They may not know who their natural, biological parents and family members are or perhaps they may not share the same language or culture of their adoptive parents/families. All children LOVE stories about themselves – most want to know what they were like when they were babies and all children need to know they are loved by their parents/families. What a treasure indeed for these children to have their own stories documented and preserved especially with associated photos so they cannot only understand “where they came from” but how their adoptive family came to love them.
As a retired veterinarian, I became our family “historian” and have been collecting our family stories and photos for several years. Quickly I needed a method to save, organize and catalogue all this information as well as present it in a way that can be shared with and enjoyed by others – then I found Heritage Makers or perhaps Heritage Makers found me! It is an online digital photography storybooking-scrapbooking-publishing business where I can help you create your own storybooks of your family history, genealogy, family events and reunions. There is no software to download or purchase. You upload your photographs, select a template/create your own, drag and drop your photos, personalize the text/tell the story, embellish as you like and when you are satisfied with the final product, you have your book printed, published and returned to you as a hard cover, bound book at a very affordable cost.
There are templates for many, many themes and events from baby births to Valentine’s Day to vacations to reunions as well as templates for family trees, military service, commemoration AND adoption! There are also templates to create recipe books, day planners, greeting cards, playing cards, scrapbook pages and albums, posters, home décor and much more. For those of you with creativity and interest, you can also start any project from “scratch” and design it totally reflecting your talents, family quirks and style.
Here are a few examples of projects I created for my family:
This is an 8×8 hard-covered, bound book I made for my Father shortly after my Mother passed away. It is a pictorial review of her life NOT the full story:
The second example is a 7×5 hard-covered, bound book just about 4 days my granddaughter, Aaliyah, spent at Camp Easter Seal one year where Brenda Baker entertained:
This next example is a 7.5×10 hard-covered, bound book I made for my niece who graduated from University of Victoria this past Spring and I used the Dr. Seuss poem “Oh, The Places You Will Go” as the text/script and then used photos from her internship in South Africa where she was studying Great White Sharks and then took a month “tour” of Europe:
Here are previews of 2 brand new templates added to the Heritage Makers template gallery today both about a Chinese adoption story – one using a collection of art called “Jade” the other done in classic red and black:
Jade
Red/Black
The final example is not one of my own books but rather someone else’s who created a book about adoption – it is also an 8×8 storybook and template that can be used by others and modified easily:
I will be in Saskatoon on March 13 at 7 pm conducting an informal workshop on Storybooking (with a focus on adoption stories) and how to use the Heritage Makers Program at the invitation of Brenda Baker who is organizing the local logistics. On display will be various sized storybook options and other projects I have created for my own family including the “real” copies of the examples I have highlighted above. Everyone is welcome. If you are not able to attend, I would be happy to share information with you. My email address is scleland@sasktel.net.
Remember, a photo without a story is a memory lost!!
Dr. Sally L. Cleland
Personal Publishing Consultant
Heritage Makers
Brenda’s note: Below is a little preamble to the above information. I decided to move it here to the bottom just so that you could get to the most important information more quickly.
Recording the Stories of our Lives
Stories are a part of our culture, our heritage, our history. Photographs, ephemera and souvenirs give our stories vitality and trigger our memories. Finding concrete ways to combine our photos and ephemera with our stories and family history can be challenging but very rewarding as then we have a tangible recording of our lives, our families’ lives, our ancestors’ lives. Now enter storybooking – the process of preserving our stories, our heritage and history in book form which becomes a treasured document for not only ourselves but also for future generations. This is the power of intentional heritage.
Why do stories have so much power? We live our stories, not just have them. Stories make sense out of life’s daily fragments; they tie the days, the weeks and the years of our lives together. They help us remember, allow us to witness life choices and make better life decisions. Furthermore, we learn and share values and develop our character through stories. The sharing of stories helps us build meaningful relationships, learn from each other and engages all of our emotions. I believe that everyone has a story (or two) worth telling as well as a responsibility to pass on their wisdom, preserve the stories from the past and the stories they are living today and use stories to shape their future.
Why else is storytelling, and the documentation and preservation of those stories, so important? Storytelling has played a significant role in human evolution. Furthermore, recent research has demonstrated impressively that all human beings, no matter their culture, race or circumstance store a large amount of information in story format, as what researchers call schemas. This information is not verbal, but situational and certain contemporary researchers have concluded that “human memory is story-based.” Stories then are fundamental to how people learn and organize what they know. Storytelling not only plays a critical role in how human beings learn but it also is critically important in social and emotional development and over time, psychologists and other social scientists as well as anthropologists have discovered how critical the true and authentically factual “stories” are but also how important folk tales, myths and fictional stories are to human development (mainly because of the lessons and morals inherently integrated into such “stories”.)
Stories are preserved in many formats – in poems, in prose, in song, in dance, in paintings, in sculpture, in conversation as well as in the traditional book format.