Genea-Musings

Genea-Musings: SDGS Ancestry.com Family History Seminar Highlights: "Publishing and Printing Using 'MyCanvas' '

This session covered using the 'MyCanvas' program, part of the Ancestry.com site tools, to create and print custom family history books, posters, and calendars to showcase your family history research and make gifts to share with your family. This is a 'Print on Demand' system - you make it, you can print it, or you can pat for a professionally produced book based on your selected content. The process relies on your Ancestry Member Tree for the names, dates and places, and the user can attach photographs and document images to create the MyCanvas product. The steps to creating the work is fairly simple - choose a size and format for the book, choose a start person from your tree, import data and records from your tree, add stories, documents, maps and more, choose layouts, backgrounds, frames and embellishments, etc. The page order can be modified as the user wishes. Pedigree charts, family group sheets and timelines can be created by the program. Notes and stories can be added to text boxes by typing into the text box or pasting from another document.

Creating the book or other article is free to anyone - they can create the family tree, upload their documents and photos, add or edit facts, sources and notes, etc. Up to five generations from the selected person can be included in the book, up to a maximum of 250 pages.

The book or other article can be printed to the user's printer, but cannot be saved on the user's computer. The book is saved on the Ancestry.com computer system, and can be accessed and edited at any time, even by another family member invited to do so by the creator. If the user wishes to have the book published by MyCanvas, price estimates are available based on cover style, binding type, and then umber of pages in the book.

Suzanne spent considerable time in this session demonstrating how to create a book from an Ancestry Member Tree, and then she manipulated book content from a previously created book to show how easy it was to add content, edit content, move pages around, add backgrounds and embellishments, etc. . . . ."