But the family history which consumes me is a different sort. I feel a constant pressure to keep a readily accessible history of our immediate family. There is so much involved in documenting a family. Taking the pictures. Uploading, naming, editing and organizing the pictures. And then putting the pictures into some sort of format that we can look at and refer back to. It's a perpetual process and I'm always behind.
Here are some of the facets of our family history and the ways it looks for us/me:
- I am usually the picture taker in the family. Mostly be default, not because of any skill. In fact, Dan is a better photographer than me, but I'm the only who remembers to snap a photo. I love how easy it is to document things on my phone now. I wish that photos and video would have been this easy to take when my kids were young!
- This blog is one way we have documented the happenings of our family since 2009. I believe a few family members (mostly Bailey and sometimes Joseph) are the only faithful readers, and that's just as I like it. I've found the blog works well to organize our events for immediate family and keep family who live far away updated. I've also liked using it to document some of my other thoughts I wanted kept as part of my own history.
- I have in the past downloaded our blog to make a hardbound "blog book." The last blog book I completed was 2010, so obviously I am WAY behind. But lately I have begun anew, and now as I do a blog post I immediately format a page with the same info in my Bookwright program. At the end of 2017 I will upload to Blurb a book which includes all the blog posts from 2016 and 2017. Last week I did a big project in which I printed out a list of all the blog posts since the last blog book, and I plan to chip away at creating pages for each of the posts in order to eventually print out more blog books.
- I keep a few journals, mostly erratically. I journal a bit on the computer because I'm much faster at typing than handwriting. I keep a daily scripture journal with the thoughts and impressions I have while reading scriptures. And I have a few other assorted journals, some which are pure therapy.
- In ancient times (like up until 2005) I scrapbooked, and I found a lot of joy in paper crafting the pages. It fulfilled a crafty side I didn't know I had. Plus, I liked the social aspect, as my sisters often scrapbooked with me. My scrapbooking days are probably over, although sometimes I entertain the thought of catching up some of the more important events in past years, as the kids like to look through the scrapbooks. But, mostly now I do digital books. They aren't nearly as much fun to create, but they have a lot of advantages. But they are definitely time consuming. I've tried it a number of different ways. I do a book for each big vacation, although I'm missed a few here and there. For awhile I did one book for each kid per year, highlighting the events of their year. The idea was that the book would be theirs someday as their own personal history. But, that got too tedious to complete so I stopped. Now I just try really hard to catch up on vacation books and the blog book. I've recently been working on a book of the Europe trip Dan and I took with Mom and Dad in 2013. This has been a very overwhelming project hanging over my head and creating a lot of guilt. But I knew I couldn't tackle the book until I had gone through all the pictures I have from the trip. I spent a few months early this year editing and categorizing the pictures, and now I am able to working a little most days on the Europe book. I have two of the ten days of the trip finally documented. Woo hoo!
Keeping up our family history really does feel like a job to me. One I like, but one which can suck me in and take up all my time if I'm not careful. So moderation in all things. I'll keep working a little bit whenever I can squeeze it in, and try to not feel guilty about that which I can't do now.
No comments:
Post a Comment