Looking back

Given the fact that time is the one luxury I have plenty of at the moment, I decided I should start one of those projects that I've been thinking about forever. Over a number of years, I have used free and public sources to discover as much family history as possible. I now have three matching scrapbooks to compile all this info: One for my grandparents and prior generations; one for my birth family and one for the 30+ years that Mark and I have been together. 

A few years ago I came up with a number of themes — school days, nesting, fashions, sisters — to help me divide up the photos and memorabilia into groupings that would cross generations.  Each one got a labeled accordion folder housed in a computer paper box. That setup let me easily add things to the right group as I came across them. Most recently I started to go through all my old photographs to add the best ones to the folders. By the time I am finished, I will be ready to shred anything that doesn't make it into these folders. 

In the pre-digital era, I organized all our photo prints and negatives in an archival storage system from Light Impressions. It is a great method for finding and preserving print images, even though the company has now gone out of business. When my mom died, all the photos she had amassed got evenly divided among the four Brazill sisters. Any photos that I don't use in these scrapbooks will be offered to my sisters and then disposed of. There are a lot of under-or-over-exposed photos, or just plain bad pix; no reason to hang onto them. 

For the moment, everything has been put away while the garden calls. I keep waiting for a few rainy days to get back to this project but the rain keeps bypassing us for the most part. 

Comments

[rae kaiser]

What a great project and your organization.You are using your time wisely.

I am off to the basement to make masks today. Too bad I hate to sew.

[Barbara H.]

And when you're done there... Seriously, this is the kind of project I keep intending to do, either in the short, dark winter days or the long too hot to be outside summer days. So far, no progress, though there is always hope for the future. I so admire your thought process in organizing this project.

[Kris P]

What foresight! I'm impressed that you collected and managed all that information in such a thoughtful and orderly fashion. With my parents and grandparents gone and connection to my father's large family lost following his death when I was a child, I've thought it'd have been nice to have some kind of family history on hand. I'd have to start with something like Ancestry dot com to open those doors to the past....

[Lisa at Greenbow]

You have quite the project lined up there. Just going through old photos is a process. I know it will be a worthwhile effort. It is good you can be getting into the garden. It is fairly dry here. We are to have some rain the next few days. We will see. Have a great weekend.