Scrapbook Journaling

In my opinion, journaling is one of the more important parts of scrapbooking. Without the journaling, you just have a pretty photo album. First, I want to share with you why I think journaling is so important and then, on Thursday, I'll give you a few tips about how to journal.

My maternal grandmother was born in 1903 and died in 1999. I am very fortunate to have her photo album that dates back into the 1920's. I have used it and other photos from her in my heritage album. In so very many ways, her album was like many other from that era.

You can see the black pages and on many photos she used those photo corners that you could buy in a box of 100 to mount photos. But, like many other people, she also just glued many of the photos directly to the black paper. You see all those great ancestors of mine and their friends, cars, & houses. Looks great...but I don't have any idea who or where they are. I can make a few educated guesses but even those guesses are pretty broad.

You can see the name, Charles Z, and 10 months written directly on to this picture. The problem is that I can't find a Charles Z in my family history so I still don't know who this man & baby are.

Ok, here you can see that my grandmother took some sort of white crayon and wrote my great uncle Arnold's name above this picture. Still, I don't know how old he was in the picture or where it was taken.

I am lucky in that my grandmother did write in white crayon above and near several of the pictures in her album.

You can see on this black page that there were several pictures with notations by them. The reason the pictures are missing is because I took them out to use in my heritage album. I had to do a bit of research to find out exactly who Arnold, Lena, Miriam & others were because they all lived in California and I have lived in Texas all my life. I only met a few of them on a few trips to visit relatives when I was a kid. Fortunately, for me, my son-in-law is very big into genelogy & has done some complete genelogies for my family. In using this, I was able to find out exactly who many of the people were and even where some of them where.

This is a page from my heritage album. The thing that makes this better than the old style albums is not the frames or stickers or other art work, but the journaling. You can see that I have written on each frame with information about who, what, when & where, as much as possible. I have also added a journaling box to the page with more information. I did this album about 10 years ago. My scrapbooking style has changed greatly since this.

Ok, I hope that you can see why the journaling is important to me. My great-grand children can look at my albums one day and they can know who the people in the pictures are. They can know what was going on and even on some of my pages, what I was thinking and feeling. My great-grandchildren don't have to guess as to the importance of the photos in my albums. They can just read what I've got there.