My Pseudo Heritage Project

I'm calling it Psuedo, because the pictures are supporting the "journaling", which isn't my own words. The story is this: My grandpa died in September 2007. When my mom was going through Grandpa's sock drawer, looking for black socks to send to the funeral home, she found an old letter. It turned out the letter was from Grandpa to Grandma, when he was in the army in WWII and they weren't yet married. The letter details a 7 day trip...or furlough? R&R?...that he took to Rio de Janiero. Grandpa was stationed in Brazil in WWII. The letter was a fascinating look at my grandpa in his early 20s. I learned alot about him, and yet he made statements that were SOOOO grandpa.

My sister typed a copy of the letter, complete with Grandpa's typoes, into the computer so we could print copies for everyone. But as I read the letter, I realized I'd seen some of the photos he talked about his friend taking. I had a box of photos I had spirited away from my grandparents' house a few weeks before. (Sounds worse than it is. My mom told me to take them since I'm the genealogist.) So I decided to combine the letter and photos into a scrapbook.

This is the first page of the letter. I had no idea where Grandpa had been stationed. So I managed to print a map from the web that showed the city the base was in, the first city he flew to, and his final destination of Rio.

This is another page from the letter. My grandpa is the man in the photo on the front left. I hand wrote the captioning from the back of the photo onto the page below the picture. I was trying to make it seem like Grandpa had actually created the scrapbook.

I like this page, as the picture is of a really neat old building. All the background paper I used, is supposed to be reminiscent of old wallpaper. Normally I hate shabby shiek. (sp?) I just dislike old-looking stuff.

This page, I just was so proud of myself to pair up Grandpa talking about buying a snazzy suit, with a picture of him in the suit.

I haven't finished the album. Grandpa's letter ended up being 16 printer pages of multiple sections. I split the letter up into small sections because I scrapbooked in 8x8. I've scrapbooked about 15 scrapbook pages and estimate I have about 15 more to go. Oi. But Grandpa LOVED to travel. My grandparents went on vacations with us EVERY SUMMER. This album is just so him.