Today our discussion about making it easy to get more pages done is about

Step 7:  Journaling

The Chinese proverb, “The palest ink is better than the best memory” is certainly true and thought provoking when it comes to making your scrapbook pages.  Yes, years down the road someone is going to be thankful that there is something written on your scrapbook page!  The ink may be faded by then, but it will be better than only pictures of which people may not even remember anything about the who, what, why, when, or where.

So many people say they don’t like their handwriting on their pages (and that is a whole separate topic).  Okay, well type it out and stick it on!  Be mindful that it could be meaningful in days to come, even to you!  Journaling does not have to be the equivalent of writing a small essay.  It’s just jotting down the importance of the photo, if nothing else the who and when!  That won’t take you that long.  Don’t make a bigger thing out of than it is, and don’t let is stop you from getting a page done.  In fact, you could always add more detail another day, or add a little pocket for some hidden journaling, in case the fact of making it so “public” would stop you from doing it.

I am so grateful that my mother has such an interest in her family, both on her mother’s side, as well as her father’s.  I think you could say she is a true heritage keeper.  Even before scrapbooking, as we know it today, was popular, she spent hours and hours writing down information on the back of any old family pictures she has.  Even though the information is on the back of the pictures, and you have to remove it from the picture sleeve to read it, the information is there.  Without journaling, we would have no idea who the people were.  Once she is gone, that information would be gone with her.  Working with her to document some of the pictures we still find, is like detective work!  Sometimes we’ll have to compare photos to others we have to figure out who people are.  Even at that, we already have missing info.

In the end, it’s all about the pictures and the words. After my husband’s mother passed away, my sister-in-law came to me with a giant box of photos, which had been my mother-in-law’s method of memory keeping.  We sorted pictures into two piles; one pile for anything documented or who we knew, and the other was a pile of photos that we had no idea of their significance.  Sadly, there was a much larger pile of pictures of which we had no clue about.  Those are the pictures that we would have been grateful for having a faint bit of ink; but there was none.

In the end, it doesn’t matter what the theme of your layout is, or what colors you chose, or how the page is embellished, it’s all about the pictures and the words.  You may have pages that speak for themselves, to you — now, but wouldn’t it be nice to look at those same pages years down the road and still have some information?  A lot of things happen in life, and what seems to be something you feel you would never forget, will become far less important and the details fade from memory.

Stop in for the next segment on Managing Your Scrapbook Time, or Scrapbooking with your Elephant