My 50th Birthday Travel Album

I finally finished it!! Last September my mom and I took a "family heritage" trip to the Madison Wisconsin area. On and off over the last 15 years, I've spent a great deal of time doing family genealogy research. My mom's family is "easy" because they all came from Norway between 1840 and 1850 - and settled in two counties (Dane and Green) Wisconsin. Thru Ancestry.com I've meet cousins 5 and 6 generations removed. Some still live very near the original homestead of the ancestors I've researched the most.

My greatest 50th birthday wish was to have my picture take at the grave of our common "mother", Birgit Halverson. She died on my birthday (83 years earlier). Despite 6-8 months of research, contacting EVERYBODY I could think of, sending my newly met cousins out to area cemeteries - we still haven't found Birgit's grave. But in the end I cherish meeting those cousins and sharing a common background! In addition, I wanted to visit the Wisconsin State Historical Society to gather records I could find online, but cost $15 a copy to get.

So here is my travel/birthday album from that trip. I started with a Graphic 45 Kraft envelope album. Covered a great deal of it in Graphic 45 Steampunk Debutant paper and added some additional mini envelopes for additional storage. Other supplies used: Primas, Glimmer Mist, rhinestones, Slice, washi tape, Memory Box stamps, and some Tim Holtz stuff.

Closed it's a pretty small album.
Just under flap is a picture (a bad one) of the birthday girl - ME!

Each "page" is an envelope. Inside I put a journal card and a photo for that day.
The small envelopes also have journal cards and hold "ephemera". In this case my pass to the UW library.






On my birthday I used this numbered paper and "highlighted" my age!



I decorated some of the inside flaps.