Keeping Memories Alive

 

This Saturday, May 6, is International Scrapbook Day, and if you’ve kept up with any of my blog posts, you know that it’s definitely a holiday I do celebrate. This year, I’m planning to hang out with Christen here at home, documenting memories while watching history unfold in the coronation of King Charles III. I’ll probably scrapbook that, too. English breakfast tea, anyone?

People often look at me in surprise when I mention scrapbooking. “Do people still do that?” they ask. My snarky answer would be to ask them if they still have memories, because, of course, they still do, but usually I just happily answer, “Yes, but you just don’t hear about it as much because all the scrapbook stores went out of business when everyone started shopping at mega stores like Michaels, Hobby Lobby, and Scrapbook.com. In all honesty, there are a lot of people who quit traditional scrapbooking when smartphones became our go-to for a camera, photo storage, and memory keeping all in one. Most people don’t print their photos anymore, they just post to Facebook or Instagram, therefore they have no need for a physical photo album or scrapbook…or so they think.

I want to go back to my first answer. As snarky as it sounds, it’s actually a valid and very important question. Do you still have memories? Are there parts of your life that have never been documented by either photo, diary, or /journal? Is your entire life up in the cloud? What will happen when that technology becomes obsolete like 8mm film, Betamax, VHS, and 8-track tapes? Will your family be able to see and keep those precious photos you took on your phone? What about that movie of little Billy making his first touchdown in a high school football game? And what will you do with all your memories of Aunt Etta’s award-winning chocolate pie and Grandma’s penchant for sneaking candy to all the grandkids when Mom wasn’t looking? Who will remember those things if no one documents them?

We’ve talked about the importance of documenting our stories many times on this podcast, both with photos and in writing. When we document our lives, we are preserving precious pieces of history that will not be remembered when we are gone – but they deserve to be. People have been documenting history since the beginning of, well…history. Early man created pictographs on the walls of his cave to tell the stories of his generation. Egyptians painted hieroglyphs in the pyramids, and much of the early history of the Jewish people has been documented in the sacred texts of the Torah. And lest anyone think that their story is not important, I must ask, “How do you know?” Did Anne Frank imagine that her little diary would someday be read all over the world in many different languages? How would you feel today if you found a personal history written by your grandmother or great-grandmother? 

There are many different ways to document your life and the lives of your family. We’ve discussed many of them on the podcast and here on the blog (I’ve included links to a few of them below). If you are a beginner or have little experience keeping journals or scrapbooks, it might seem daunting, but it really can be as simple as you’d like. To demonstrate some of the different styles (and hopefully inspire you!), I've created a video walk-through of different methods which I’ve posted on my Crafty Neighbor YouTube Channel. I hope you’ll check it out. And if you do decide to start documenting (or if you already do), please tell us about it in the comments below or start up a conversation in our MMC Chat Facebook group.

Modern Musings blogs and podcasts about memory keeping:

• A Little Christmas in November, Oh My - blog

  November 1, 2021

• December Daily podcast 

  November 3, 2021

• Two New Halloween Traditions - blog

  October 29, 2022

• Tell Your Story - blog

  November 1, 2022

• Crafting When You Travel podcast

  November 30, 2022

• I Love to Craft When I Travel - blog

  December 1, 2022

• Creatively Flexing My Muscles - blog

  December 3, 2022

Knowing Where You Come From

Where do I come from? I can give you the easy answer. I come from Vernon, Texas. That’s where I was raised. That’s where my mother and my grandparents and their parents were raised. My mom’s side of the family could even say that they are a founding family of the Vernon, Texas area, a blink-and-you-miss-it town off Highway 287 on the way to Colorado from Dallas. That’s where I come from. But, what is in my DNA? I had always heard that my family was Irish; more frequently, I was of Native American descent.

My father was always interested in genealogy and instilled that interest in me at a young age. Before the internet was a massive thing, my dad and his cousins, Bob and Lavonna, kept a notebook with paper records of our family tree as far back as they could research. When Ancestry.com launched in 1996, it wasn’t long before my father had a membership. He worked off and on for years building our family tree.

In the summer of 2015, I moved to Eagle Mountain, Utah, and lived there for eight months. While exploring Salt Lake City, I discovered the Family History Library. When I walked in, I was greeted warmly by the attendants and asked to be seated in the auditorium for the next presentation. The other patrons and I were shown a video on ancestry and the Family Library. Afterward, we were escorted to a large computer lab and assigned a computer. Attendants helped us make a FamilySearch account and assisted us in building our family tree.

I wasn’t sure, at first, how to get started but an attendant sat with me and showed me how to search and get real results on FamilySearch. After hours of searching and building, I left the library with a partial family tree built. I returned to the library several times that summer to work on my family tree and talk with the attendants. My family history was fascinating to me. I knew a few names and origins, but I wanted to know more.

A few years later, I received a free trial for Ancestry.com and began to transfer my family tree from FamilySearch to Ancestry as well. I also was able to discover my late father’s Ancestry account. More of my family members also made Ancestry accounts and we were able to compare family trees and connect. My cousin Lavonna and her husband Tommy sent in their Ancestry DNA kit a few years ago to discover Tommy’s birth family. Lavonna also discovered that we had a cousin named Mary, an unknown child of my uncle Kenneth’s. That discovery made me want to try Ancestry DNA.

While doing research for the podcast, I finally purchased an Ancestry DNA kit, and my results were somewhat surprising. Although two of my great-grandmothers were reportedly full-blood Cherokee, my results did not show any Native American DNA. I was also under the assumption that I was mostly Irish, especially on my father’s side, but I am actually almost equal parts English, Northwestern European, and of Scottish descent. I am only 11% Irish. What surprised me the most was that I am 5% German.

As I developed my family tree more, I discovered more things about my family:

• My family only spent a generation in Northern Ireland and before that, we were in Scotland.
• My family was not only Scottish, but they were Lowland Scottish Gypsies (or Romani).
• My family has royal ties in Scandinavia.

The more I look into my family, the more I hope to discover. In the meantime, I want to hear from our readers. Have you bought a DNA kit through Ancestry or a competing company? Did you get any interesting results? Let’s continue the conversation below!

Tell Your Story

November starts the real preparations for December Daily. I’m not going to tell you about that project yet again, but there are some good takeaways from projects like that. Since it is also National Novel Writing Month, I want to use the novel-writing theme to talk about documenting family stories, but instead of doing paper crafting, I want to focus on writing stories and using digital aids to create books you and your loved ones will treasure for many years to come. 

I will mention several of these in the podcast tomorrow, but I wanted to share a little bit more about them here. I think I’ve mentioned Becky Higgin’s My Modern Story multiple times in the last year of podcasts. This is a wonderfully helpful method for documenting family histories and personal stories of all kinds. She created this project as a heartfelt attempt to help others, especially non-scrapbookers, find ways to quickly and efficiently preserve those important memories before they are gone. The workshop is free and can be completed quickly in one evening or an afternoon. It utilizes her Project Life app and allows you to add stories or text of any kind, really, along with photos. It’s so simple and she has great ideas for where to find those stories, like taking posts directly from social media, etc. I’ve used this app multiple times to document family stories, and I plan to eventually convert the stories I’ve created there into a family history book – the pages can be used to create stunning, hard-bound books either by downloading the pages directly or by ordering through the app. There are, of course, some in-app purchases, which are optional, and you can make your storytelling as simple or as complex as you like.

Along those lines, for those of you who like the look of traditional scrapbook pages, but don’t have the patience, money, or time, there are lots of options for creating fun, colorful, and artistic pages digitally. Many of the major scrapbooking design companies now offer digital versions of their products, which you can use with Photoshop and other applications to create beautiful scrapbooks right on your phone or computer. In fact, the aforementioned Project Life app can recreate the look of traditional or pocket-based scrapbook pages by using digital papers and other elements right in the app (in-app purchases available). Once you’ve created your pages, you can download them to print at home, order prints from the app, or convert them into a bound book as described above.

And speaking of bound books, don’t forget that online photo retailers like Shutterfly, Snapfish, Persnickety Prints, and Amazon Photos also create lovely bound books to preserve your family memories. You simply create your pages at home on your phone or computer, upload them to the print retailer of your choice, arrange the pages as you like, and order…simple as that. Most of them also offer an in-app method for designing your pages, where all you do is drag and drop your photos and text. This is a fantastic way to document those family stories, with or without photos and/or text. What’s even better is that you can order multiple copies of a book to give to other family members. Remember Christmas? It’s less than two months away….

One last word about documenting stories…and yes, it does involve December Daily. December Daily Prep Day is coming up on Saturday, November 12. This is a day that many participants look forward to as we spend our day online with the DD community getting our supplies ready and pre-making pages so we are ready to document when December 1 rolls around. There are often tips for organizing, beautiful page ideas, lessons of all kinds, and, of course, a lot of camaraderie as we all start to get excited about not just December Daily, but the holiday season as a whole. You can find out more about DD Prep Day in the links below.

Whether you scrapbook or not, celebrate Christmas or other holidays, or just spend the fall and winter months hibernating in your hidey-hole, this is a great time to start thinking about the stories and the legacy you want to leave behind. Do you have cool stories about your ancestors? Do you have more recent memories that you don’t want to forget? Or do you have a trauma that needs to be brought forward into the light of day so you can heal and move on? Documenting your stories is a great way to do it, and the options for how you get started are truly endless. If you need more help, or encouragement, or have questions, please feel free to email me or comment below…I’d love to help you get started telling your stories.

• Ali Edwards - December Daily
• Just Write - also at AliEdwards.com
• My Modern Story by Becky Higgins