I am in the process of putting together a book about my family history (as a Christmas gift for my children) In the book I will be including a lot of family photos, many of which will need to be restored in one way or the other. My question is what is the best way to begin such a task. While I know very little about photo restoration, I know that I cannot possibly afford to send them out to be repaired. Any thought or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Photo restoration is a daunting task, there is no one-size-fits-all. It's a matter of finding the right tools for your particular photos.
YAFU Tutorial: Photo Restoration: Removing scratches and stains
Have a look through our section, Photo Restoration & Enhancement for what other people have done.

Also check this thread at Gimp Plugin registry, photo restoration for some ideas. Note mahvin's suggestions for scripts that may help and have a look at saulgoode's Mini-tutorial at the end.

A YouTube search for, Gimp, photo restoration has a bunch of tutorials to help with ideas about different techniques. The danscourses 'How to restore a photo using the GIMP' series is a good start.

If you could post a few examples of your photos I'm sure you will get more specific suggestions.

Very good sources Odin.

Here are two of the photos.

Just curious how are you scanning your photos? Are you using just your scanner software or are you using it from within Gimp (If your not using Gimp scan to TIFF or PNG). What are your scanning settings? Are you changing them for black and white photos? The reason I'm asking is you'll have a better chance of improving them if you start with proper scans.

A few scanning tips from the best.
A Simple Way to Get Better Scans
Restoration of Genealogy Photos

Do you have negatives? If so the ones that you have negatives for it might be better if you digitized them at your local photo mart.

The pictures were emailed to me from my brother.