Three blue Rubbermaid totes sit in the apartment space above our garage.
Three containers filled to the brim with photo albums, scrapbooks and memories from my side of the family. Years and years of memories are collected in these containers and as I carried them back from Ohio this past trip I wondered what on earth I was going to do with them.
I am still wondering. I whiled away an afternoon this week opening the containers, sifting and sorting through the albums. Located in those albums are the memories of not only my own mom and dad but those of their parents and their families. There are birth certificates, wedding certificates, college year books, high school year books and newspaper clippings galore.
I am thrilled to have such pieces of family history preserved both in written and in photographic form. Not everyone has something like this and I am happy for those who went before me that thought to save these items. I am pretty sure a lot of the credit goes to my daddy who somehow knew how important these items might be to someone in the future.
I found myself giggling at times and weeping at other times depending upon what I was viewing. There were the pictures that I remembered taking and sending to my parents and my Grandma – the best of our boys growing up. There were childhood pictures of my own parents -Daddy and his sister and my mom and her pet chicken. Of course there are a lot of pictures of relatives and people that I have no idea who they are. But what fun to sift and sort and look at years and years of history.
The next step (post wedding) is to get the mess into some sort of order and then proceed from there. My sister had all of my dad’s slides scanned and put in digital form for all of us and I would like to be able to do that with these items as well but it will definitely take some time. I think it will be time well spent.
Do you have items like these in your house? I would really be interested in hearing what other people do with things like this. Did you keep them? Did you come up with some creative way to preserve them? All ideas are definitely welcome – I have a lot of things to consider when I finally get around to working on this project.
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