

Grouping - Wherever possible, place photos near the text, narratives, and charts that relate to them.Use a grid to organize photos of various sizes on a page. Consistency - Notice a trend? It's just as important with photos as it is with other elements.GIMP is widely considered to be the best of the free image-editing software programs.

You can repair tears, remove scratches, and improve contrast with most graphics software. Image enhancements - Enhance scans of old photographs with image-editing software.Photos - Include whatever family photos of deceased ancestors and living family members you can find - the more, the better, in the highest-quality originals or scans possible.Boxes or lines - When making boxes or drawing lines on charts that connect family lines, use a consistent style.Small caps - As in narratives, use small caps (rather than standard all caps) for surnames.Keep info together - Whenever possible, use page breaks to divide information about each descendant.The indents help maintain readability when compressing chart information to save space. Indents - Use indentation with bullets or numbering to list successive generations of descendants.Consistency - List birth, marriage, death, and other dates in the same format throughout your book.Use subheads to break long stories into sections, perhaps by year or by the location during migration to other areas. Entice readers into the story and keep them reading with visual signposts within paragraphs such as initial caps, indents, bullets, pull quotes, and boxes. "Chunking" - Long blocks of text, no matter how well-written, are boring.Small caps work, too, and can be quite attractive. Small caps - In genealogy, it's common practice to set surnames in all caps to make scanning easy.Create a specific style for the footnotes or notations, and use it consistently throughout. Footnotes - Include footnotes or explanations of names so that readers know that "Aunt Susie" refers to the Suzanna Jones found on page 14, or that "the Baileys" are a family who lived next door.Memories - Include a special section in the book for stories from living descendants that detail what they remember, what life was like growing up, and their lives today.Grouping - Group narratives of key figures or other historical information at the front of the book followed by charts, or place biographies of key figures of each branch immediately before their corresponding descendant charts.Consistency - Develop a consistent but distinctive format for all narratives, taking into account margins, columns, fonts, and spacing.
