Debbie Corrigan will turn 55 this year. A baby boomer with children and grandchildren, she loves researching her family history.
Last year, Corrigan, of Winchester, Va., wanted to create something permanent out of her research — a tangible representation of her family tree that could hang on a living room wall. But nothing she found was quite right.
“When I did some searching on the Web to see what was being done for family trees, you’d see all these family trees that looked like real trees,” she says. “I wanted to make something people could give their kids that their kids would actually want to hang on a wall.”
So Corrigan used her computer to design her own modern family tree. Relatives liked it so much they asked her to design ones for them, and soon she began offering her services on the craft website Etsy.com as a researcher and designer of graphic family trees.
Many of her customers are fellow baby boomers seeking to illustrate their personal histories in creative ways. Some make printed books and wall art to celebrate their past.
The website Blurb.com has become a popular destination for creating personal books that preserve thoughts and memories.
“There’s something really powerful about the printed book” to baby boomers, in particular, says Brenna Lewis, head of marketing and products at Blurb. Young enough to use web-based tools enthusiastically, they’re also old enough to appreciate the value of a tangible, hard copy.
Many boomers, Lewis says, are creating impressive, coffee-table books of their own photos, accompanied by long paragraphs of text, or personal cookbooks detailing favorite family recipes and memories.
Some write about the life lessons they want to teach the next generation. Others chronicle their recollections of the moments captured in old family photos. Children of aging boomers are also using Blurb and similar websites to create history books for their families, interviewing their parents and grandparents to preserve their wisdom.
Finding raw material is easier than ever: Along with writing out their personal thoughts, many boomers are using tools like Ancestry.com to gather copies of census forms, military records, and other data that can be used in books or works of art. “Technology has absolutely been a game-changer for family history. It has made global records available from the comfort of your home,” says Ancestry.com’s family historian Michelle Ercanbrack.
