Memories are not always expensive

Seven Generations

I don’t know about you, but Christmas came and went a bit too quickly. I truly hope you had a wonderful time with your family and friends (and I hope you wrote down some of their stories!). As for me, I enjoyed a mini staycation with my wife Christine and our “puppy” Milkbone. Thanks to modern technology, we enjoyed gift opening with our families via FaceTime.

For as long as I remember, my sister and I agreed to give at least one gift that was homemade. Have you ever done this? If not, you should. It’s fun and its personal. It’s certainly more interesting that socks.

Anyway, this year I decided to focus my “talents” on combining photography with genealogy.

When my mother passed away in 2006, I inherited all her old photographs. She had inherited them from her grandmother, Bertha (Fischer) (Habicht) Kruger, through her mother Ruth (Habicht) Hinton. It was – and remains – a wonderful one-of-a-kind collection of family history.

As I scanned through the pictures, I noticed something. Not only did I have Bertha and Ruth’s pictures, I had Bertha’s mother’s picture as well as her mother’s mother’s picture. My wife suggested that putting these together would be a memorable gift for my niece Jillian. It would represent seven generations of women, from 1825 to present.

So I did it.

Using Adobe Photoshop, I performed a little magic and viola! There it was. I sent the final product to ezprints.com and received the result two weeks later. Not a bad gift for only $25.00, huh?

Photographs make a wonderful gift for family and friends. Even something as small as a framed 4×6 can make a person smile.

Postscript: While FaceTiming my sister on her birthday a few days after Christmas, she already had the picture framed. Apparently it was “commandeered” for display in their hallway.

Sorry about that, Jill!