My Experience with MyCanvas

Back in November, I wrote that I had discovered MyCanvas through Ancestry and was very excited about making family calendars for Christmas presents with this creative application. I thought I would share my experience as a customer and also the responses of family members who were recipients of these gifts.

First of all, I ended up making five different calendars with two themes. The first theme was called "Postcards from the Past" and featured some postcards from the collection of my husband's paternal great-grandparents, George Rice WESTABY, III and Rena (LERFALD) WESTABY. You can see images from this calendar from an earlier post I wrote here. I made three sets from this calendar by simply copying my original, which had the birthdays and anniversaries of all of George and Rena's living descendants printed on their respective calendar days. From this original, I tweaked one calendar by removing some of the birthdays and anniversaries to show only the information of my parents-in-law and their descendants. My husband's parents, siblings, his dad's siblings, and some of his adult nieces and a nephew received these calendars. I also made one for my household, but then added birthdays and anniversaries of my family members.

Click to enlarge

For my own extended family, I made a seasonal theme calendar (the default theme that comes with MyCanvas calendars). I called this one "A Celebration of Memories" and it featured modern photographs of family members' birthdays, anniversaries, and reunions, along with quotes about family. This calendar also had two sets: one for my parents, which had birthdays and anniversaries of both my parents' extended family members; and one for the rest of the family that focused on the special days of my parents and their descendants.

One of the best features of this application which I really appreciated was the ability to duplicate the calendar theme with all the backgrounds, embellishments, and uploaded photographs and images--like the postcards--yet have the calendar information be unique to each household or a group of households, if desired.

Using MyCanvas is free, and you don't have to have a subscription to Ancestry to use it. Simply visit http://www.ancestry.com and chose Print & Share, or go directly to http://mycanvas.ancestry.com. You can decide to use your own printer for your projects, but I figured the paper quality would be better through MyCanvas' printing process, and the cost of ink for my printer would be phenomenal; so I willingly paid the order price for printing. Normally $19.95 per calendar, I was able to use an online coupon that was visibly advertised on the site at the time to receive a 20% discount. Since I finished my projects so close to Christmas, the reduced price helped offset the extra money I spent in expedited shipping. I shipped two calendars to my parents-in-law; one for them and one for my sister-in-law's family. The rest I had shipped to my home to either give in person or to ship with other gifts I was sending to family members located across the country.

All the gifts arrived on time at their original destinations, which is saying a lot, considering the record amount of snowfall we received in Washington State and in Spokane in particular the week the gifts arrived. I believe MyCanvas' use of UPS as the shipping agent was key, as other items I had ordered through other companies which were shipped via FedEx arrived much too late to be given on time for Christmas. Remember, weather played a huge factor in shipping to this area.

Responses
The responses I received from family members were everything I hoped for, and more! From my husband's family, we heard many thanks and exclamations at how beautiful the calendars were. They loved the idea of seeing their family history displayed in an attractive and useful way; after all, everyone needs a calendar, and this was a way to ensure that a little bit of Westaby and Lerfald history was noticed each month. My own family members enjoyed the modern photo calendar as well, and I've already planned to do a historical one for them next year.

Problems
There were only two issues I had with the calendars. One was that one of the calendars made for my extended family had a slight torn corner on the cover of about 1 centimeter wide. This was not shipping damage; the torn corner appeared under the shrink-wrap, and I imagine that the damage was done during the shrink-wrapping process.

The other issue was that one notification e-mail was not sent to me. MyCanvas was very good about sending e-mails both when an order was completed and when the order was shipped. They arrived in several shipments of one to six calendars each, depending upon the number in each set I had created. The calendar I had created especially for my household did not arrive with any of the others, and I did not receive an e-mail regarding its shipping (I double-checked my Spam and Trash folders of my e-mail account, just to be sure) . Since it was not a Christmas gift for other family members, I was not overly anxious, but I did call Customer Service to see if they could track it for me. They did, apologized for the lack of e-mail, and assured me it was on its way. UPS delivered it on Christmas Eve. The Customer Service personnel I talked with were warm, eager to please, and efficient.

What I'd Like to See
I so enjoyed my experience with MyCanvas and am anxious to use them again, not just for calendars, but for photo, recipe, and family history books. Some suggestions I have for the company is that they increase the number and variety of embellishments to include more military, immigration, vintage, seasonal, year-round holiday and seasonal items. I'd also like to see them expand to print stationery items, such as notecards, envelopes and bookmarks. While I can use other online printing companies to create a set of matching notecards and envelopes with my ancestors' photos or documents, I'd like to be able to keep all my creativity in one place, and use embellishments and backgrounds to enhance them.

Grade
My experience with MyCanvas was deserving of an A- grade. The slightly torn corner was my only real issue, but I as I've reiterated before, I will use MyCanvas again (and again!) to continue to create gifts and preserve our family's heritage in a meaningful, aesthetic way.

If you'd like to know more about using MyCanvas, you can read selected posts at the Ancestry.com blog here. Also, this coming Wednesday, January 21st, at 8:00 PM Eastern Standard Time, Ancestry will host a live free webinar (online seminar) on "Using MyCanvas to Print and Share Your Family Stories." You can register for it here. If you're unable to attend the webinar live, you should be able to access it in the archived webinars at a later date; however, you will not have the advantage of live assistance and immediate responses to your questions. You do not need to have a subscription to Ancestry to either particpate in live webinars or access their archived ones.

Using Ancestry's MyCanvas Program for Creative Christmas Fun

Oh, my.

I can't remember the last time I've such fun with graphic design. Maybe a number of years ago, when I created my family tree website. Or when I purchased Paint Shop Pro and learned how to pixel paint.

Except when I was building my website, I was still new to HTML coding (which I taught myself, with the help of online tutorials like Lissa Explains All), and when I was pixel painting, I was trying to figure out how to create I-frames (what I did worked with Internet Explorer, but not with Mozilla Firefox--my browser of choice).

So my creativity was tempered with a lot of learn-on-the-fly and frustration.

Lately I've been hearing a lot about Ancestry's MyCanvas program in various press releases on blogs--a program in which you can create personalized items like family history books, recipe books, photo albums, posters, calendars and the like. I had tried out playing around with making a family history book a while ago, but it didn't really interest me. There's this hesitation I have about putting genealogy into print, knowing that a family history is never really complete or accurate (thus my preference for websites and blogs, where one can easily update, correct, delete or add information as it becomes available). I received an e-mail yesterday from Genealogy.com, a member of The Generation Networks family, of which Ancestry was also a part. This message was advertising several MyCanvas products--including calendars--at 20% off (they're $15.96 through December 24; order by December 11th to receive in time for Christmas via standard shipping or by December 16th via expedited shipping). Now for several years I've been envisioning making a family calendar to hand out as early Christmas gifts at our annual Robbins Reunion dinner the end of October, but do you think that I've been able to get on the horn and actually even attempt to create one? Oh, no...not procrastinating me!

So I thought I'd take MyCanvas out for a test drive with a family calendar...and all I can say is: oh, my!

Twenty-four hours later, I've already got three calendars in the works. The first is for my extended family, which will use the classic default holiday/seasonal background pages (I'm just a sucker when it comes to holiday decorations and the like!), each of which I plan to upload images from my PC of family members who celebrate birthdays or anniversaries that month. Another is for a family member that I know would appreciate some of the lovely designs of teapots that I purchased on CD this summer from Pats Web Graphics (I use my photo-editing program to convert images to .jpg files...MyCanvas also accepts .png files). The third is for my husband's family, featuring the postcards that his great-grandmother, Rena (Lerfald) Westaby received in the early 1900s from family and friends while she was working as a maid as a young single woman in the Midwest. Here are some screenshots from that project. Behold, the cover:

Here's the front and back of an Easter postcard, which I have stored in my online Picasa album (MyCanvas also works with SmugMug albums):

Now here it is featured on an April calendar page, using the wonderful digital backgrounds and embellishments of MyCanvas:

Okay, one more! I've got to show you the December page:

I've already got plans for calendars for the next few years: ancestral photos, documents (you can use the ones you view with your Ancestry subscription, too), recipes, you name it. The nice thing is, you can make a basic calendar with all your family's important dates, and then copy it, personalize the graphics, and add/delete events that are customized to each household. And what's more, it is a simple, one-handed easy-to-use project--perfect for someone like me, recovering from shoulder surgery!

Hello, my name is Miriam, and I'm addicted to MyCanvas. And no, I wasn't asked to write a post about this.