Incorporating Family History into Home Decor

As an amateur genealogist, I am very proud of the goodies I've found regarding Hugh Wasson. After all its taken hours and hours meticulously searching to find what little evidence I have of his life. So, of course, I want to show off this hard work with the addition of a shadow box to my family tree wall.

I had this plain old wood shadow box frame that I got off the clearance aisle at Michaels years ago.  It was a little beat up then.  But it has traveled with me while I shuffled around 3 different houses and now it is really beat up.  So I decided to go with it.  

I used a coffee stain to give it more of that look.  I made a cup of coffee and put the grounds in a jar (See, if a person actually reuses all those Classico jars she saves, that means said person is not a hoarder, right?) with a steel wool and filled the jar up with vinegar. And the hardest part for me, put the jar up and wait 24 hours.  We always keep a jar of this stain in the garage because it only gets better with time.

This is so easy to do and I love the way this stain makes the wood look so old.  And of course that is so appropriate for this project.  I actually used the steel wool to apply the stain to the wood and then waited a couple of hours. I applied it 3 times and each time, it got a little darker.

After that last step, this frame may or may not have been lost and/or forgotten about for a couple of months while I was busy doing something else that seemed way more important at the time.  Oh, the life of an ADD crafter...most of the time I get a project 75% of the way done and think to myself, "Hey, that is really going to be cool when I finish that!"  But then, out of the corner of my eye, something will catch my attention and all of a sudden, I think, "I must reupholster that chair right now!"  But anyway, I digress.

When I got back around to it, I put a coat of Tung Oil on the frame to protect the wood.  The coffee stain gave the wood that perfect reclaimed wood look as if it had been outside for decades but the tung oil warms the color up a bit.  In these next two pictures the tung oil has been applied only to the outside of the shadow box so you can see how different it looks.

Here I've applied the tung oilon the left side only.

I wanted to figure out some way to display the South Carolina land grant that Hugh Wasson received in upon arrival in Charleston in 1772 (find your ancestors in the South Carolina Department of Archives Online Database).  But I also wanted to show a picture of what the land actually looks like. So I came up with this idea.  I had Office Depot print a 12 x 12 copy of the land grant and a 7 x 7 copy of the photo of the land.  Then I glued the photo to some black foam board.  This makes the photo more sturdy.  I glued one magnet in each corner on the back side of the foam board.  Then I also glued magnets in several spots on the inside of the shadow box.

This allows me to reposition the photo.  Most days my OCD brain wants everything center and symmetrical. But other days the genealogist in me wants to be able to show off the land grant by taking the photo off altogether or just positioning it off to the side.  So this way I have the best of both worlds.  Then I glued the land grant into the shadow box and hung it up.

And the finished product...

In the center

On the side

Without the photo

Of course, I had to move around some pictures to get it in the right spot.  I'll probably have this wall full of holes before too long!