Most of us have shoe boxes or plastic bins filled with photos from the years of our lives. If we are lucky, we have managed to sort the boxes into various years or decades, and there is some semblance of order to these memories. Amid the photos may be ticket stubs, greeting cards, and various trinkets that we want to remember but we are not quite shore how to organize. Imagine leaving this legacy to your children. They would spend days sorting through the boxes trying to order the material, piecing together a life they want to understand, but just cannot get a grip on when it is stored in a box. Chances are there are photos of people they will not recognize, curious pictures of events they do not recall, and questions about why certain items were saved and others were not. Maybe you have saved all of your graduation cards but none from birthdays or anniversaries. Maybe you kept the ticket stub from the first baseball game you ever attended but did not save a wedding program. Your kids and grandkids deserve to understand your way of thinking and why you held on to certain things. A scrapbook is a great way to help them understand once you are no longer here to explain it. Compiling one now can be a lot of fun and it organizes your memories before it is too late.
You may want to ask your children or grandchildren for assistance. They may remember stories now they can share that can be included in the scrapbook and they can read about them in years to come. Maybe last Christmas was the best ever for your six year old granddaughter. She can share those memories with you, you can write them down in a scrapbook besides the family Christmas photos, and 20 years from now she will remember the day as told in her own words.
You can also document the time before you had children and grandchildren. Start with your earliest photos and label the people in each picture. You can include stories about your relationship with each person, or include a message directly from them if they are still in your life. Future generations will appreciate the effort you made to inform them and share their heritage with them. There may be stories you forget to share when you are alive, or these stories may not capture the interest of surly teenage grandchildren. However, a few decades into the future they will be fascinated with the time and effort put into chronically their family history. You can create a scrapbook for each member of the family so they can share them and piece together their common history, or you can create all-encompassing books with copied photos. Do not forget to include things other than photos in these books. Scraps of paper, swatches of fabric, important documents, and family recipes all make great additions to traditional scrapbooks. Your relatives will truly appreciate your effort in documenting the family history.