The first card was for a brewer, which reminded me that my Bavarian great-grandfather had worked for a brewery — driving a horse-drawn beer cart, just like the guy in the old Budweiser commercials. The next card was for a baker, which brought to mind my great-uncle Ludwig, who’d owned a bakery. The baker’s card shows his birth date, former nationality, date of arrival in the United States, date of naturalization and address in New York City. Henry (formerly Heinrich?) Otto immigrated in 1881, at the age of 16, and received his citizenship in 1886, after fulfilling the five year residency requirement.

This index card shows that the Common Pleas Court of New York County granted citizenship to Henry Otto on September 29, 1886.

Ever since 1795, U.S. naturalization has required two separate applications. The first application is called a Declaration of Intention (also known as the “First Papers”). The second application, filed at least three years later — after the immigrant has been in the country for at least five years — is called a Petition for Naturalization or Petition for Admission to Citizenship (also known as the “Second Papers” or “Final Papers”).

Before 1906, any court at the local, state or federal level could grant petitions for naturalization. In 1906, Congress established the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, which standardized naturalization forms and processes. In the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration systematically indexed the pre-1906 court records for New York and several other northeastern states. The index card above for Henry Otto was created during that period, several decades after Otto received his citizenship.

After keying a few index cards, I tried some original citizenship applications, including both declarations and petitions. These documents contain dozens of details about the applicant, including age, occupation, physical features, birth date and place, current address, date of arrival, name of the ship that brought the applicant to the United States, last place of residence in the native country, and names and ages of the applicant’s spouse and children.

This declaration of intention provides a detailed portrait of the applicant, Gershon Peck, who immigrated to the United States from Lublin, Russia in 1858.

By the time I finished keying Gershon Peck’s declaration, I’d outlined a whole screenplay in my head about his epic journey from Lublin (in present-day Poland) to Liverpool, his sea voyage to Philadelphia and his adventures in the new world. Unfortunately Leonardo Di Caprio is probably too tall to play the leading role. But imagining Peck’s exhausting, perilous travels, the persecution he was likely fleeing and the challenge of adjusting, rather late in life, to a new culture made me appreciate my relatively pampered existence — and the sacrifices my own ancestors made to start a new life in this country.

If you’re interested in getting involved, now is a great time to join the Ancestry.com World Archives Project because several sets of naturalization records are available for keying, including index cards from California, Illinois, New York, Montana and Washington, and original declarations and petitions from California, New York and Pennsylvania. The index cards are super easy. The originals take a little more work, but they’re fascinating to read. Who knows? One of them might just inspire you to write a novel about a paper hanger from Eastern Europe who immigrated to the United States a few years before the Civil War…

In anticipation of this anniversary, Ancestry.com has digitized and indexed three new collections of New York records:

• Mortality schedules for 1850, 1860, 1870 and 1880: These mortality schedules are an important addition to our extensive repository of census records. The same enumerators who took the population census also compiled non-population schedules focused on mortality, agriculture, industry and manufacturing, and social statistics. As a first installment, we’ve just released a complete set of New York mortality schedules for 1850, 1870 and 1880 and a partial set of schedules for 1860 (we’re still working on the counties near the end of the alphabet: New York through Yates).

• Naturalization indexes for the years 1906-1966: These records were indexed by members of the community through the Ancestry.com World Archives Project. Like all indexes created by the project’s contributors, the naturalization indexes will always be available to the public for free.

• City directories for Albany, Buffalo, New York City, Niagara Falls, Rochester, Watertown and White Plains: Most of these directories are from the 20th century, but some of the New York City directories go back as far as 1833.

The New York 400th Anniversary page provides easy access to the Web’s largest repository of New York-based records, including passenger lists from the peak immigration years of 1820-1957, vital records from the Dutch, English and American periods, and dozens of other collections.

I hope you’ll join us in celebrating New York’s history by visiting our 400th Anniversary page and exploring your own connections to the state. If you have a success story relating to your New York research, please share it by posting a comment on this blog.

Several participants mentioned that they would have appreciated a more detailed demonstration of the image and text editing tools. We kept the demo quite brief this time around, assuming that most audience members were already somewhat familiar with MyCanvas.

If you’re new to MyCanvas, I would strongly recommend that you visit the Ancestry.com Webinar Archive and view two previous webinars from earlier this year.

• Using MyCanvas to Share Your Family Stories provides an in-depth, step-by-step demonstration for creating a family history book. It covers all of the basic navigation and editing tools and is a great introduction for new users. (January 21, 2009)

• Creative Gift Ideas for Moms, Dads & Grads includes demonstrations for creating family tree posters, collage posters and photo books. It covers some advanced editing features that apply to all MyCanvas products, including family history books. (April 8, 2009)

This will be my last MyCanvas blog post, since I’m currently transitioning to a new role within Ancestry.com. In the future, Kelvin Hulet and Wendy Jessen will keep you up to date on new developments relating to the MyCanvas publishing service and other tools for sharing your family stories. You can expect to hear from me on topics pertaining to new content releases and our community record indexing initiative, the Ancestry World Archives Project.

Thanks for all of your feedback and support over the past two years. Your input has helped us build a world-class publishing service benefiting hundreds of thousands of Ancestry.com members. Please keep the suggestions coming!

Best,
Stefanie

A descendant tree poster could start with you and your spouse and include all of your kids and grandkids. Or it could start with your grandparents or great-grandparents and include your parents, siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins. If you’ve had a hard time getting your extended family members interested in your family history research, I guarantee you they’ll pay attention when they see their own face on a family tree poster.

To make a descendant tree poster, you must first create an online tree on Ancestry.com. When you’re ready to build your poster, click the “Publish and Print” tab on the Family Tree interface, and then click “Create a tree poster from your tree.”

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That link will take you to the product selection page for Family Tree Posters.

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Choose the descendant format, then choose the number of generations you want to include, the tree you want to use (if you have more than one) and a starting person for your poster. You can include three or four generations in a descendant tree, so make sure you pick a starting person who has at least two generations of descendants.

Here’s an example of a three-generation descendant tree poster in the 20″x16″ size. All the people in this poster are related to me, but the names and dates have been changed.

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If you’re making a four-generation poster, you’ll probably want to choose the 36″x24″ or 24″x18″ size. You can make a descendant poster with either a landscape or portrait orientation. The best orientation for your poster depends on the shape of your tree, so you might want to experiment and see which one works better for you.

You can choose whether you want ex-spouses to appear on the poster. Stepchildren will only show up if they’re associated in your online tree with someone who is a direct descendant of the starting couple. For example, let’s say the step-mom is a daughter of the starting couple. If the step-kids are identified in your online tree as children of the dad and his ex-wife, they will not appear on the poster. If you want them to appear, you’ll need to identify them as children of the step-mom. In your online tree you can specify the nature of the relationship (biological, adopted, step-child, etc.), but on for the purpose of making a poster it doesn’t really matter, since a step-child is displayed in exactly the same way as a biological child.

As always, you can change the background, add embellishments and edit the text and photos to give your poster a personal touch. Please note that you can also move and copy the lines (“sprites”), in case you want to change how some of the family groups are displayed.

For a step-by-step demonstration, sign up for our July 16 webinar. This webinar was originally scheduled for June 24, so if you’ve already saved that date, be sure to update your calendar and reserve July 16 instead. The webinar will begin at 8 pm Eastern Daylight Time. We’ll cover descendant posters as well as descendant family history books, which will be available through MyCanvas in early July.

Eventually I decided to stop trying to control her experience and just let her explore the aquarium in her own haphazard, two-and-a-half-year-old way. I even bought her a pink stuffed Nemo that she picked out in the gift shop, although I’m pretty sure every clownfish I’ve seen in nature has been orange.

I hope that when you use MyCanvas to build a book or poster, you feel free to explore, experiment and express your own personality. Our product development team has tried to give you as much creative freedom as possible, so that you don’t feel like there’s a control-freak aunt standing over your shoulder telling you where to put your photos or what colors you can choose for a border, background or caption (or stuffed clownfish).

This month we’ve added several new features that give you more flexibility than ever. For the examples below, I created a page in our “Baby Girl Pink” photo book theme. These screen shots are a little grainy, but I think you’ll get the idea.

Although I’m using a photo book page to demonstrate the new features, they apply to family history books, posters and calendars as well. The only exception is the layout switching feature, which doesn’t work for family history book pages that require data from your Ancestry.com tree. But if you have photo layout pages or text layout pages in your family history book, you can use layout switching for those pages.

Our new layout switching feature lets you easily change the layout of an existing page. Go to the Layouts tab in the left panel to see the available options. In the top part of the Layouts tab, you’ll see the basic layouts that aren’t associated with a particular theme. In the bottom part, you can view the layouts for a particular theme. Use the drop-down menu to narrow down the options according to the number of photos you want to include on the page. For book pages, there are also a few text-only layouts.

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By hovering over page thumbnails in the Layouts tab, I can see how this page would look if I applied a different layout.

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When I find the layout I like best, I just left click on the thumbnail to apply the layout to my page.

What if I want to swap these two photos so that the one on the left is in the right image box and vice-versa? Instead of finding the photo thumbnails and reapplying them to the page, I can use our new photo swapping tool to make the switch. When you’re on a page with two or more photos and you select one of the photos, you’ll see an icon in the top right corner with an arrow and two little boxes.

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Click on that icon, hold down your left mouse key and then drag and drop the photo into the other image box.

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When you release the cursor, the two photos will have switched places.

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You can do the same thing with text, too. Click on any text box. Then click on the text swapping icon (which looks just like the photo swapping icon) in the top right corner of the text box.

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Hold down your left mouse key and drop the text box into another text box on the page.

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The caption from Text Box A will appear in Text Box B, but with all of the formatting attributes (font size, etc.) of the original caption in Text Box B.

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The last feature I want to show you is our new panning tool, which lets you drag a photo within an image box. You’ve always been able to pan in MyCanvas, but we’ve made it easier and more intuitive. Whenever you click on an image that’s pannable, you’ll see a compass-like icon in the middle of the image.

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What I mean by “pannable” is that the original photo has been cropped. Either part of the photo got cropped off when you dropped it into an image box or you manually cropped the photo after you placed it on the page. Panning lets you adjust which parts of the photo show up and which parts get cropped off. Place your cursor in the circle, hold down your left mouse key and drag the photo within the image box.

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Once you start panning, you’ll see the whole photo. The parts that are cropped out will be transparent. When you’re done panning, just release your mouse key.

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By the way, we recently added more than 2,000 new K&Co. scrapbook embellishments, as well as a new collection of masks with brushed edges. To check out our new features and content, go to http://ancestry.mycanvas.com.

The first half of the presentation covers family history products (family tree posters and photo family tree posters), while the second half focuses on more contemporary gift products. So if you’re only interested in family history products, you may just want to watch the first half hour. On the other hand, if you’re working on a family history book (or thinking about starting one), you’ll probably find it worthwhile to watch the photo book demo, since all of the tools and features covered in that segment are equally applicable to family history books.

Many thanks to our very engaged audience for submitting some great questions for the Q&A.

Our next MyCanvas webinar, scheduled for June 24, will focus on helping you get ready for your next family reunion. We’ll present two new products that will be released just in time for reunion season: a family reunion book and a descendant family tree poster. We’ll also show you some collaboration tools that will make it easier to get other family members involved in your efforts to publish your family history. So if you’re one of those super-organized people who plans your calendar two months ahead, I hope you’ll save the date and plan to join us.

In keeping with our “freedom of expression” philosophy, the MyCanvas publishing service provides many different tools for editing and manipulating text in a book, poster or calendar. We give you so many options that you may not be aware of some of them, even if you’re an experienced MyCanvas user.

In MyCanvas you can:

• Position a new or existing text box anywhere on the page
• Resize, rotate and copy a text box
• Choose from 30 different fonts
• Customize the font color to match another element on the page
• Customize the color of a text box background
• Adjust the opacity of a text box background
• Layer a text box on top of an image or another text box

To help you visualize how it all works, here’s a sample page I threw together. It’s a collage poster that I designed from scratch. Of course you could also create a page like this in a photo book or calendar.

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Since I wanted to stack the letters vertically instead of typing them in horizontally, I created a new text box for each letter. To make the last letter, “X,” I have two options. I can click the “Add text” icon in the main toolbar to create a new text box, which I can then place anywhere on the page.

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Or, since I’ve already formatted three text boxes, I can copy one of them using the Copy icon in the text editing toolbar.

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I just move the copy where I want it and then type an “X” in place of the “E.”

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Notice that I’ve put drop-shadows on all of these letters to add some depth. You can add drop-shadows to text just as you can to images.

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If I want to change the typeface, I click on a text box to bring up the text editing toolbar and then select a font from the drop-down menu. In this case, since I’m working with four text boxes, I’m going to apply the change to all of them at once to save time. To do this, I select the first text box and then hold down the Control key (or the Command key, if I’m working on my Mac) while I select the other three boxes.

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A few weeks ago I blogged about our new color picker, which lets you pick a color from a precise spot on a photo and apply that color to a border or page background. You may have noticed that the background of this poster exactly matches the blue from the side panel of Alex’s Spiderman costume. The color picker also works for text: you can use it to customize a font color or the background of a text box.

In this example, I’m going to multi-select the four text boxes and then change the font color to a custom shade of red that matches Alex’s costume — or, more accurately, a particular spot on his costume. I just grab the eyedropper tool and place it on the exact spot that I want to match. If I choose an area with no shadows I’ll get a different result than if I pick a spot close to a seam in the fabric, where the color appears darker.

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To add a background to a text box, I click the little white “A” box that’s right next to the color box in the text editing toolbar. I check the “Background” box to make a background appear. The background is white by default, but I can change it to any color I want.

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Now look at the slider just below the checkbox. It lets me adjust the opacity of the text box background.

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By default the transparency is always set to zero, meaning that the background is fully opaque. To make the background transparent, I can either slide the little bar to the left, type in a percentage or use the arrow keys to increase or decrease the transparency. In this case I decide to make the background about 50% transparent.

I play around with the backgrounds for a while and decide I like the effect of making two of the boxes fully opaque and the other two 50% transparent.

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To create the illusion of depth, I can copy a text box and then layer the original on top of the copy. I like how the “A” stands out when I set it apart from the other letters in this way.

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In this last version, I keep the layering effect but change the background colors for the other three letters, using a darker shade of blue that matches the shadowy part of Alex’s costume. In this example all the text boxes are fully opaque.

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I’ve only covered the advanced text editing features because the basic features — like changing the font size, changing the text alignment and using the bold, italics and underline tools — are pretty self-explanatory to anyone who’s ever used a word processing program. But it bears mentioning that only a handful of online photo book applications even let you do something as basic as centering or italicizing text. Most only let you change the font type and size and choose a font color from 15 or 20 options.

At MyCanvas, our goal is to provide much greater flexibility than other self-publishing sites without an overly complicated user experience. If you have any suggestions for how we can improve our service — with regard to our text editing tools or any other aspect of the MyCanvas experience — please let us know.

To provide feedback, you can post a comment on this blog or send us a message through the “Give Feedback” link in MyCanvas.

Last but certainly not least, in my biased opinion, you can use the MyCanvas publishing service to create family history books and posters based on the data in your tree. If you’re new to family history, new to Ancestry.com or just new to MyCanvas, creating a family tree poster is the perfect project for you because it’s easy and fun — and you’ll get the satisfaction of seeing your family tree come to life in tangible form. You can make a poster that includes as few as four generations or as many as nine.  

Step 1: Build an online tree — or upload an existing tree to Ancestry.com.

If you store your family history data in desktop software program, such as Family Tree Maker, you can export your tree as a GEDCOM file and then upload it to Ancestry.com. “GEDCOM” is the universal file sharing format for family history software.

When you create or upload your tree, you’ll be asked to choose a privacy setting. No matter what setting you choose, information about people we believe to be living (based on the birth and death data you provide) is always hidden. Your name and contact information are hidden unless you choose otherwise.

If you’re interested in learning more about the three privacy settings — Public, Private and Hidden — scroll down to the bottom of this post.

Step 2: Create your family tree poster.

To access the MyCanvas publishing service, click the “Publish & Print” button from your online family tree. You can also click the “Print & Share” tab from the Ancestry.com home page, or just follow this link: http://mycanvas.ancestry.com.

From the vertical navigation menu at the top of the MyCanvas home page, click “Products” and then click “Family Tree Posters.” Select your poster format and size. Family tree posters are available in a combination tree format, which has a bowtie shape, or a standard pedigree format. The size of your poster (20×16, 24×18 or 24×36) depends on the number of generations you want to include. You can make a combination tree poster with 4, 5 or 7 generations or a standard tree poster with 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9 generations.

If you have more than one online tree, choose the one you want to use and then pick a starting person for your poster. The starting person can be anyone in your tree. Name your project and then click the orange “Continue” button.

MyCanvas will automatically pull the relevant data from your tree to create your poster. If you have primary photos associated with the people in your tree, it will include those as well. If you have photos attached to a particular person but you haven’t designated a primary photo, no photo will show up for that person (but you can easily add photos to your poster, as described below).

Step 3: Customize the design of your poster.

If you like the clean, simple look of your auto-generated poster, you can go ahead and click the “Order” button. But I’d recommend that you spend at least half an hour customizing your poster’s look and feel. It’s easy to do, and you’ll be happier with the end result because it will reflect your own personality.

Here are some of the things you can do:

• Change your poster’s background. Click the “Backgrounds” tab to explore the options. There are several nice tree backgrounds that are designed to be subtle enough that that they won’t detract from your family history data. You can also use the advanced color palette to create a solid background in any color, or use the color picker to match a color in a photo.

• Add embellishments. Click the “Other Content” tab to access thousands of embellishments that you can drag and drop onto your poster. You can move, resize, rotate, flip, copy and combine embellishments to get the look you want. There’s also a folder that contains more than 200 flags from different states and countries. Flags are a great way to indicate your ancestors’ countries of origin while adding a splash of color to your poster.

• Add photos. Any photos that you’ve attached to your online tree will appear under the “Ancestry Records” tab. You can also upload photos directly to MyCanvas or import them from Flickr, MyFamily, SmugMug or Picasa. To add a photo to your poster, grab the thumbnail and drag it onto the page. You can either drop the photo into an image box or just place it wherever you want. Once a photo is on the page, you can easily move, crop, resize and rotate it, add a border or frame and even make the photo transparent.

• Edit text. You’ll want to zoom in on a particular area of your poster before you try to edit the text. Go to the Zoom icon on the top toolbar. When you move the slider bar or click the plus sign, a little box will appear in the top left corner of the main workspace, right under the Zoom icon. That box is a map of your poster. The red square inside the box is the panning tray. It shows you which section of your poster you are currently seeing in the main workspace. To move to a different section, just move the panning tray.

The Zoom tool may sound a bit tricky, but it’s super easy to use. I think a screen shot will help you get the idea:

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I’m not a professional designer, but here are a few simple design tips for family tree posters based on my experience using MyCanvas.

Tip 1: If you have color photos and black-and-white photos on the same poster, try changing the color photos to black-and-white for a more cohesive look. Better yet, try changing ALL the photos to sepia. Black-and-white photos from different time periods tend to have a lot of variations in tone and hue. Making them all sepia gives you more consistency. I also like the warm, brown tones. Of course, you may have different preferences. The great thing about MyCanvas is that you can experiment with different effects until you figure out what works best for you.

Tip 2: Use embellishments sparingly. A few carefully chosen embellishments can add a touch of warmth and artistry to your poster. Try using the “send to back” and “bring to front” tools to layer some of the elements on your poster. For example, you can position an embellishment so that it’s partially hidden behind a photo or another embellishment. But don’t go overboard. The main focus of the poster should always be your family history information and family photos. My favorite embellishments are in the “Pencil Art” folder. They’re subtle and delicate and won’t overwhelm your family tree data.

Tip 3: Use transparent images to add visual interest. Of course you’ll want the headshots of your ancestors to be fully opaque. But once you get further back in your tree and run out of photos, try bringing in historical postcards or other types of images.* I saw a poster made by a Mayflower descendant who had scanned a painting of America’s most famous ship and placed it over the information about her Mayflower ancestors. She made the image maybe 40% transparent and sent it to the back so that the text in front was easily legible. I’ve seen people use images of a family farm or local church in similar ways.

*Legal disclaimer: If you’re using an image you don’t own, make sure you’re not violating any copyright laws by including it in your MyCanvas project.

Step 4: Print your poster and share it with family members and friends.

Before you order a printed copy of your poster, you’ll want to preview it carefully to make sure there are no mistakes. Use the handy Zoom tool.

We don’t offer framing, but MyCanvas posters come in standard sizes. That makes it easy to purchase a frame at whatever price point you’re comfortable with, from less than $20 to, well, the sky’s the limit if go you to one of those custom framing places. As always, do what works for you.

Don’t forget that you can also share your poster electronically. This sharing feature makes it easy to get feedback from a family member before you order your poster. When you share a MyCanvas project, you can invite the people you’re sharing with to purchase their own printed copy. You can also choose to let them with create their own electronic copy of your project (or not).

Apologies for the long, rambling post. I believe I’ve told you everything you ever wanted to know about family tree posters and then some. In the unlikely event that I left something out, please post your question on this blog so that I can respond for the benefit of the whole community.

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Note about Privacy Options for Online Trees

Since the privacy options have recently changed, I’ll explain what the different settings mean so you can make an educated choice.

• Public: Recommended. We hide living people in your tree, but Ancestry.com members can view your deceased relatives. This setting is the best option in most cases because it lets you collaborate with other researchers and tap into the collective knowledge of the Ancestry.com community. We hear success stories all the time from people who’ve filled in gaps in their tree by connecting with other members who turned out to be distant cousins. Ancestry.com has millions of members. Chances are, at least one of them has information about your ancestors.

• Private: Optional. The names of your deceased relatives appear in search results, but their details are blocked. Other members can contact you anonymously to request more information. You can then decide on a case-by-case basis whom you allow to view your tree. This setting can be a good choice in cases where you’re not quite confident in your data. You can create multiple trees with different privacy settings, so if you have a particular ancestral line that you’re not ready to share yet, you could keep that data in a separate, private tree and still share your other lines with the community.

• Hidden: For specific instances. No one can see any of the information in your tree except you and people you invite. This setting is especially appropriate for professional genealogists who are doing research for a client. If you hide your tree, you can still use it for organization, hints and printing books and posters, but you’ll benefit far less from the greater community. Since the community is one of the main advantages of using Ancestry.com, think carefully about the trade-offs before you choose to hide your tree.

How do I hide my tree? When you initially create or upload an online tree, you’ll only see two privacy options: Public and Private. We’re working on getting the Hidden option added to this menu so that it’s easier to find. In the meantime, if you want to hide your tree, you’ll need to select “Private” and then click the “Manage Tree” link right under the tree’s name on your Family Tree page. You’ll see a summary page that shows how many people are in the tree, how many photos you’ve uploaded, etc. In the middle of this page is a line that says, “Is Tree Public?” Click the “change/more info” link and then check the box labeled “Do NOT include this tree in the search index.”

You may be wondering what I mean by “people we believe to be living.” If you’ve provided a birth date but no death date for a specific relative, our system assumes that person is living if he or she was born less than 85 years ago.

I thought it might be helpful to walk you through the steps for creating a family history book that goes back more than five generations. I last covered this topic in the blog a year ago. Since then we’ve made a few changes to the interface, so it’s probably a good time to revisit this topic.

If you’re new to MyCanvas, Ancestry.com’s online self-publishing service, you can get to it by clicking the “Print & Share” tab from the Ancestry.com home page or by clicking the “Publish & Print” button from your online family tree:

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You can also go directly to http://mycanvas.ancestry.com. I may be biased, but I suspect that this will soon be one of your favorite sites, so you’ll probably want to create a bookmark so that you can easily find your way back later.

From the MyCanvas home page, click the “Start a Project” button to see the available product categories.

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To explore the various cover options for family history books, click “Learn More” in the vertical navigation menu at the top of the page, then click “Covers & Binding.”

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Don’t spend too much time obsessing about the cover options at this stage, since you can always change your cover choice later. Really the only thing you can’t change later is the size of your book, so think carefully about whether you’d rather make an 11×8.5-inch book or a 14×11-inch book.

From the “Choose a Product” page — which you can get to from the “Products” link in the vertical navigation menu or the “Start a Project” button on the home page — choose “Family History Book.”

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Then select a format for your book: Standard, Combination or Descendant. The format you choose determines what kind of chart appears on the first page of your book and which ancestors are automatically included in your book.

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On the next page you’ll choose the size of your book and how many generations are automatically included. You’ll also select an online tree (if you have more than one) and a starting person (or couple, if you choose the Combination format) for your book. The starting person can be anyone in your tree.

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In this example, I’m creating a combination, 4-generation book with my grandparents as the starting couple. That doesn’t mean that my book is limited to four generations. It just means that when I hit the orange “Continue” button at the bottom of the page, the system will automatically generate a set of pages — including family trees, family group sheets, timelines and record pages (if applicable) — for my grandparents and their children, parents and grandparents.

On my grandmother’s side, my information doesn’t go much further back than those first four generations. But on my grandfather’s side, I have some lines that go back eight or nine generations. I can easily include those more distant ancestors in my book by inserting additional pages. One of the lines for which I have a lot of data is my grandfather’s straight paternal line. In the family tree page at the beginning of my book, that line ends with Karl Speth, my grandfather’s grandfather.

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I can add Karl Speth’s ancestors to my book by creating a new family tree page starting with him. To do this, I click the Pages icon in the main toolbar and then click “Add pages.”

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A new page pops up, showing me all of the available family history page templates.

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I select the Standard Family Tree and click the yellow “Add Page(s)” button in the bottom right corner.

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I select a tree and a starting person for the new family tree page. The tree does not have to be the same as the tree I used when I started the book (although it is in this case). Note that I also have the option of adding other family history pages — family group sheets, timelines and record pages — for the people in the new family tree chart.

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You can use this process to add family history charts starting with anyone in your tree, which is a good way to include distant ancestors as well as collateral ancestors like aunts, uncles and cousins. Once you’ve created all the family history charts you want to include in your book, you’re just getting to the fun part: adding photos and stories and customizing the design of your book. But that’s a topic for another blog post…

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The checkmarks only apply to one project at a time, meaning that when you’re working on Project A, you’ll only see checkmarks for photos you’ve used in that project, not for photos you may have used in Project B. The checkmarks are continually updated as you work on your project. So if you place a photo on a page and then decide later to delete it, the checkmark will disappear from the thumbnail.

We’ve gotten quite a few requests for a calendar that starts in some month other than January. Most of these have come from procrastinators who didn’t finish their 2009 calendars in time for the New Year, but we’ve also heard from a few overachievers who want to get a jump on 2010. And I suppose there could be all kinds of reasons for starting a calendar at the beginning of the academic year or fiscal year instead of the official calendar year.

Whatever your motives, you can now pick the starting month for your calendar. On the “Make a Calendar” page, look for the drop-down menu right above the orange “Start working on your calendar” button.

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The third new feature is something nobody’s asked for, but once you start using it you’ll wonder how you ever got along without it. You can now pick border and background colors that exactly match a color in your photo.

Before we launched the magic color picker, you could either choose from 70 predefined colors that pop up when you click the Colors icon in the image toolbar:

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…or use the advanced, full-spectrum color palette.

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The advanced palette lets you choose among subtle gradations of color, which gives you a lot of flexibility.

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The only problem is that it sometimes takes several tries to find the right shade. Here’s where the color picker comes in handy. To access it, click the little eyedropper icon in the top right corner of the color palette box. Now click anywhere on your photo. The border will automatically adjust to match the color of that precise spot.

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In the screen shot above, I matched the border to a fuchsia flower. By moving the eyedropper down about half an inch, I can change the border to match a red flower instead.

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You can do the same thing with backgrounds. When you click on the Backgrounds tab, you’ll see a little color box near the bottom (where it says “or choose a background color”).

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Click on the box to access the color picker (as well as the basic and advanced color palettes). Then click anywhere on your photo to apply that color to the page background.

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The color picker works for text, too. You can use it to change font colors and also to change the background color of a text box. Try it…and then let me know what you think!