Frandsen Family Book

I've spent my entire holiday season working on a family history book for Jake's grandparents, Mel and Mary Frandsen. It has a photo genealogy chart, and pictures of ancestors, them growing up, their children, and a few of them in later years (all color-coded so it is easy to see whose ancestral line we're looking at). I made 12x12 scrapbook pages that we planned to send to Shutterfly to be bound (so we could have full bleeds off the pages instead of having a white border). Our deadline was December 19 so we could get it in time for Christmas. Jake and I found the pictures (at his grandparents' and parents' houses, and a few ancestors on the internet), Jake photoshopped most of them, and I made the pages. It was about December 14, and hundreds of hours into the project, when our external hard drive crashed. I had just barely transferred everything from my laptop to the external to free up space, and I had a new external that was on its way from Idaho at the time (which was going to serve as our backup). Everything we had was on it, but after having it checked by professionals, we were told that if the files could be extracted, it would cost $1800-$3000 (with no guarantee). This was supposed to be an inexpensive gift! We obviously couldn't afford that, so now we had a choice. Give up, or start over? I felt like we should start over, so after many tears on my part, we did.

We still had the beginnings of the pages saved on our laptop, which saved us about ten hours of work. We had a majority of the photos on Jake's parents' computer where we scanned them, but none of those were photoshopped. We worked our guts out for the next two days (and actually found some pictures we'd missed before), and since we already knew what it was supposed to look like, it went pretty quickly. November 17 was a great day because I was finished, and it was even a day early!  Honestly, this project is all I did for weeks. I would set up shop at Jake's parents' house, and they watched Grant while I worked all day (and often most of the night) to finish this.

I was using the scrapbook program I've used for the last year, so I never dreamed I would have problems exporting it to a PDF or JPG, but I've never made a 12x12 page before. We hit a major snag, because we now had files that weren't printable. The 19th came and went, and we'd tried everything. The customer service for the program was unable to help us because the specialist had gone home early to start his holiday. More tears came, and I told my father-in-law, "It's not like this is temple work or anything! Why is Satan working so hard against us?" After several sleepless nights in a row, we figured out how to take each image and go through a long process to export it to JPG formatting. We uploaded the book to Shutterfly at 4 a.m. on December 20, and paid extra money for two-day shipping.

The book arrived on December 23, and it was perfect! At least it seemed like it was until we realized that we had forgotten to upload a page of Mel's ancestors. We printed that one page at AlphaGraphics and stuck it in, deciding that we would have to order a new one for them after Christmas. We'll keep this one.

My back hurt, I'd been stressed to the max, my hands were aching, and I was suffering from mild carpal tunnel, but at least it was finally finished! Hooray! Between Jake and I, we probably spent a thousand hours on the book. And as stressful and miserable and crazy as it was, it was one of the best ways I could ever have dreamed to spend Christmas. His ancestors became real people to me, and Christmas is all about family, right? I don't even know how to explain it, except that I felt connected to them and, thereby, to the Savior.

When we gave it to Mel and Mary on Christmas Eve, we couldn't have asked for a better reaction. She teared up several times (which she rarely does), and thanked us over and over. They told us stories and pointed out interesting things. Christmas Day they made sure everyone looked at it, and it is proudly displayed on their cofee table. We now have about 20 orders for more from family members.

Oh, and Mary told us that after we'd asked her about a certain ancestor, she'd looked them up on new.familysearch and discovered several people that hadn't had temple work done. Hmmm. Maybe that's why this all happened, after all....