Family Historian

I just now decided that I am going to title myself "family historian." That summarizes and gives weight to something which takes a lot of my time. 

I do feel a great impetus to organize and document our family's experiences and growth. This has taken many forms over the years. I wish I could say that I've kept great journals, but I haven't. I have a smattering of journals. Right now I have a scripture journal and a journal where I record gratitude thoughts and where I see the hand of the Lord in my life. But I haven't consistently kept a journal of the events of our lives. But, I have kept up photobooks of various types, and I am hoping that the text I add to explain the pictures is doing enough to document events and experiences.  From about 1995 to 2004 I was an avid scrapbooker. I pretty much scrapbooked every picture for awhile (around the time of Bailey's birth) until I got better at picking the best pictures to add to the books. Consequently, I have 26 big scrapbooks which take up the bottom rows of one of my bookshelves.

Then, around the time Joseph was born I fell off the scrapbook wagon, intending to climb back on once I got used to being a mom of four kids. But, then in 2006 we quite suddenly moved to a different state and the intensity of life ratcheted up even further. Scrapbooking was so far down my list of things to do that I didn't even think about it for years.

By the time I was ready to start picking up my scrapbook supplies again, the scrapbooking mania had really died down in favor of digital scrapbooking. I started doing digital books, where I created pages with our pictures and then printed out the books. I have about 30 of these books. Many are from family vacations. For a brief time (2007-2009), I made and gave each child their own personalized digital book documenting the previous year. Ha - that didn't last! I found it SO tedious to re-work the same events four times over to make four different books. And, I never made a "family" book of those years for me to keep.

Around that time blogging became a thing, and I started this blog. It has proven to be an fun way for me to document our family events and some of my thoughts and share them with family living far away. When blogging was hot, there were companies who transferred blogs into digital books for print. I created one of these books, bringing us from 2009 to halfway through 2010.

I have been on and off with keeping up the blog, but overall have documented most of our family events. I have not been good about creating books from blogposts since 2010, and the services to directly transfer blogs to books have disappeared. So, for the last year I have been painstakingly copying and pasting pictures and text into pages of a Bookwright program. I am almost done formatting the pages for 2016 and 2017 and then I will have the book printed. Over the next few years I will go back and finish transferring the blog from 2010-2016, plus hopefully keep up with transferring current posts into a book.

This has been a serviceable way to document life, but it's a little sad that in order to keep things simple, I don't even add any colored backgrounds to the pages of my blogbooks. I just print on white pages and cram the pages with photos and text. I don't find the process of making digital books very fun or creative, but I'm glad that the option exists. At the same time, I have also been trying to go back to finish some of the other digital books I missed, including books of our Europe vacations, etc.

Then, in a very unexpected way, scrapbooking has returned to my life. Over Christmas Aubrey wanted to do a job to earn money. I asked her to organize two huge storage bins into which I have been throwing memorabilia and pictures for the past decade. She did a good job, and I found myself helping her fine tune our new amazing organization system. As I did, I found a stack of scrapbook pages which I had prepped about 11 years ago (with pictures laid out on pages but not glued in). I decided to pull out my scrapbook supplies and quickly complete those pages. And, as I did, I remembered how much I love the process of scrapbooking. There is something about the tactile experience of touching the photos and paper which satisfies my creative needs more than digital books do. So, after finishing those few pages I kept organizing old photos in the storage bins and found more stacks of pictures which need to be scrapbooked. That led to me pulling down smaller photo storage boxes I had stored in a closet and I sorted through and organized those photos, pulling out even more photos to scrapbook. It has been a month of big messes, with piles of pictures stacked in every room.

At this point I have set up a scrapbook station in my bedroom. I am trying some time each day working on pages while watching or listening to something. Recently Aubrey and I have been watching the 6 hour Pride and Prejudice while I scrapbook! My goal is to catch up those years which are missing from all of our photo books, parts of 2005-2007 and everything from 2008-2010. A big part of this will be FINALLY documenting the pictures from Joseph's first few years, essentially creating his baby book.

I'm a little scattered, it is true. It is also true that it might be easier for me to focus on one project or era at a time. (I won't even talk about how I also have decided to paint and redocorate most of the house, so there are paint splotches on the walls in most of the rooms, as well as scrapbook supplies and pictures strewn everywhere.) But, in addition to trying to blog/document current events, I am really enjoying documenting the pictures of an earlier era of our lives, when we were so YOUNG and we had all four kids home and life was chaotic and busy and overwhelming and (I can clearly see now) so precious and monumental.

Because I'm a list person and because I have a lot of things I'm trying to fit into each day, I set a goal each day to work a little bit on each of my family historian projects. By the end of this year, I hope to have some true family treasures completed!