10 Steps to hanging your family history wall

November 10, 2023
By Vicki Entreken

When you grow up in a house with a mom whose family was taken from her at five, you don’t have many family pictures on the wall. We had a couple frames for my brother and I, school photos that were changed out every year. If there were others, they were from my dad’s side of the family. There may have been a tabletop picture of her adoptive parents that showed up around Christmas time and then disappeared again after the visitors left. The rest of the wall-hangings were landscape paintings and a pair of 3-foot-tall conquistadors Mom and Dad brought home from Germany. Mom’s family was missing and I never noticed.

As my kids were growing up, I was a little better at framing my family than my mother. I too had the latest school photos of the kids and there was a collage or two that included various pictures of them in halloween costumes or camping, or playing with their cousins. We had larger professional photographs done too.

After Mom died, I found a large high school graduation photo of her I’d never seen before. Education was important to her, yet I don’t remember seeing this on our wall.

Then I found a box of secret photos and letters she never showed me. It took a great deal of research to identify her biological family in a small moldy photo and her mother in an 8 x 10. Again, these were never on the wall, but I wasn’t surprised. She hated this woman for abandoning her, and if I do the math correctly, the age of her mother in the 8×10 on the right (below), mid-twenties, would have been right about the time she left her, almost as if someone yelled, “Hey Geneva, before you go…can we snap a picture for the girl to keep?”

Well, she kept it. I was staring at not just her mother, but my grandmother. Here’s the fun part: I never knew this woman, which means I have little to no hesitation to write about how she was born illegitimate and married off at 15; how she became a singer and songwriter before running ran away from her husband with a strange man; how she couldn’t keep a man in her life and became a stripper. Her brother even gave me a picture of her on stage, but you’ll have to buy the book (when it’s done) to see that.

This was my grandmother and she’s been a hoot to research and write about. With that, I decided it was time to start putting family pictures on the wall. All of them.

At the time, I still lived in Florida and we had a long hallway to the back of the house. You can’t see all the photographs in the picture above, but they were spaced out nicely and I organized them from our earliest relatives to current day. All were black and white except the last one: a family picture of the four of us at the dinner table. We were in color. Organizing all of the family into the different random frames was fun. There were 15 pictures when I finished my first family history wall. When we downsized in 2018, everything was boxed up, not to re-emerge until we found our forever home.

I can’t remember which magazine it was in, but there was a picture of a dark green shiplap wall with old pictures crammed together over a reading chair in the corner of a cozy room. I loved it. I clipped it and put it into an idea book that I can’t find anymore because we moved too many times. But the vision stayed with me. Now, we’re in our forever home. I have my mother’s collection of photos, I’m digitizing my father’s collection, and guess what? My empty living room wall is green!

Even with this newly painted empty canvas ready to be covered with family history, I had a dilemma. This new wall is way smaller than the hallway in our last house. I would need to do some creative jamming together of pictures to conquer this project, and patience: the very reason I procrastinated for two years. And I’m not the only procrastinator. I know you’re out there. I’m hoping that by sharing my project, step-by-step, it will reduce any anxiety you may have in doing your own family history wall.

A project like this can be overwhelming and easy to put off. I broke it into stages so you can at least start on the first stage and immediately earn bragging rights. All you have to do is decide which wall you’ll use, point at it, then say out loud: “I’m working on a Family History Wall Project,” and there you go. Your project is officially launched. Sounds official, right?

Let’s do this!

Collect & Frame

1. Decide on a decor scheme. I chose the old random frame look after seeing it in that magazine. (It may have been an issue of Real Simple.) I have other walls in the house decorated with modern black frames, but for this project, old and used work the best.

2. Gather the prints you have and print the ones you don’t. This includes begging relatives for the pictures you don’t have (or stealing them from a Facebook page or two. I ain’t afraid.) When printing this time, I opted to have Walgreens print them for me because my photo printer died and they did a much better job anyway. Now my grandparents on my dad’s side don’t have streaks running through their faces. The Walgreen’s app makes it super easy and it wasn’t expensive since most of the frames I collected are 4x6s and 5x7s. I did have to put a tiny sticky notes on the designated frames while waiting for the prints because my memory sucks.

Don’t overthink which photos will be which sizes. I let the frames that I had dictate the size of the prints I ordered. This reduced the decision-making tremendously, and I tend to overthink things, another reason for my procrastination.

Thanks to new-found cousin, Mary Jones, I have a photograph of my great grandmother on Mom’s side. Because I’m digitizing Dad’s collection, I have even more photos of Dad’s parents, Dad as a young twin, and Dad with his darling wife, Peggy. Another new photo I love is hubby as a teenager, looking like Joe Cool. Best of all, I have a new photograph of my parents before they were parents.

3. Collect old picture frames from yard sales and thrift shops. It’s fun to find a great deal and you earn the license to brag. Each time you find one, stuff a print in there and set it aside.

Sort and space

4. Clear a working space by moving furniture away from the wall.

5. Turn on scary movie theme music. (Obviously this project was done in October.)

6. Sort photos into groups. For my project, I tackled them chronologically again, this time putting the oldest relatives in the far corner and worked from right to left, putting the current photos closest to the doorway. Groups were great-grandparents, grandparents, our parents as kids, our parents as adults, family photos, us as kids (with siblings), our family photos with the kids, then the kids themselves, and finally one last photograph of the two of us from our October waterfall hike in the DuPont State Recreational Forest.

Center and assemble

7. Find the center point. Identify which picture you want at the center of your family history wall. I’m using a unique family history-style piece I found at a second-hand store. Then figure out where you want your center to be. It could be at the center of the wall itself or centered over a couch or pair of chairs. I centered mine over the loveseat. Having two cushions gave me a line to work with so it was easy to mark.

8. Lay out your pictures on the floor in the order you want them. I started at the far end with the great grandmothers. Don’t worry about exact spacing until they’re all on the floor, then you can slide them around as you like. If your family photos aren’t chronological, you could use your center point picture and work outward from there. I laid mine out in columns with anywhere from 2 to 4 pictures in them.

8. Measure using the tallest column of pictures. You’ll need to determine how high and low you want the pictures to hang. In some columns, I had three pictures, top to bottom, with the tallest column on the entire wall being 28″. With that measurement, I could figure out how high on the wall I wanted the entire row of pictures to sit. I left a little extra room in case I want to put a tiny shelf behind the loveseat in the future.

Hang and Brag

9. Hang the center picture first, then go outward from there. Once I had the center picture, and because I laid everything out on the floor, the hanging part was easy, and I did it all by the eye instead of measuring every single one.

10. Take a picture and brag to your friends on Facebook!

There were a couple little pictures that had to be rehung because they looked out of line, but for the most part, everything went up easily. With David’s help holding either the hammer or a picture, steps 4-10 were done in one afternoon.

I hope this helps you get started on your own family history wall and have fun with it too!

Thank you for reading. 
I appreciate you.
~ Vicki