Pass on your family's story by creating a biography books about your favorite relatives. This is a wonderful way not only to share information with future generations but also a structured way to learn more about your heritage.

Getting Started

1. First, select a relative to feature in your biography book and begin to gather information about their life. If they are living, interview them, and ask them to tell you about each stage of their life. If they are deceased, interview family members who knew them well and who can help you put together a story of their life. If they lived several generations ago, you may need to rely on documents, letters, newspaper articles, and family records to put together your biography.
2. Take the notes you have gathered and use them to look up additional resources such as newspaper articles, birth certificates, marriage licenses, letters, diplomas, and importantly, photos.
3. Create a digital copies of printed pictures and paper documents by taking pictures or scan the items and save it as a high resolution (300 dpi) .jpg image. If you have a large number of items it may be easier to take them to your local photo center and ask them to scan the items for you and save them to a disk. Many photo centers will be willing to do this for a very reasonable price. For more information about adding these items, check out our Add a Keepsake Page.
4. Organize your notes into a word document which will allow you to spell check your text before you paste it into your Picaboo book and organize the documents and pictures from each period of life into different folders. This will make it easier to organize them within Picaboo.

Creating Your Biography Book

1. Create a new book in Picaboo and add the pictures that you have gathered for your Biography Book.
2. Organize you photos chronologically and for each page, decide how many photos you would like to group together for that page.
3. After you have decided on the number of pictures you'd like to include, browse through the Picaboo page layouts until you have found one that will accommodate all of your photos.
4. As you are arranging your photos, copy and paste the text you have written out to narrate the story of your relative's life.
5. Select a color palate for your book and browse through our collection of free backgrounds to find a set that you would like to use in your book. Save the large online preview to a new folder on your desktop to make them easy to find and add to your Picaboo book.

When you are finished with your book you will have created a wonderful keepsake and also learned a lot about the history of your family.