Journaling- I still suck at it!

Mom was our family genealogist, and now I have the photo albums from our family that go back into the late 1800's. On the back of each photo, the person's name, the date, and sometimes the location. That's it. My mom knew the stories about the people that she knew - their personalities, their relationships to each other, hobbies, etc. Sadly, not one of those stories was written down. Just the name, the date, and sometimes the location. My parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, all are dead except for one of my brothers. Generations of stories, gone. Yeah, I have the pictures, but I know nothing about the people unless I personally met them.

I'm the flip side. I journal. I throw out pictures that I don't like, or that are redundant, so I have fewer photos. What I have preserved are some really great stories about the people I care about.

 

@Aerobigirl I'm in a similar situation, photos with no stories. Here is one example: My DH's great-grandmother came to the US from Sweden when she was 13 years old, sent to live with her grandfather & uncle. The uncle was a jeweler, this we knew. I managed to track down info on him in the Chicago city directory. He was a watchmaker in 1869. In 1871 he opened his own business & later that year, his business was burnt to the ground in the Great Chicago Fire. He reopened his business in 1872. And then a few decades went by with nothing, but then I found a newspaper article that talked about him getting robbed at his store where he sustained a gunshot wound (to the thigh) as a result. I managed to put together a few decent scrapbook pages with these stories, and I wouldn't have know about them unless I did some genealogy research.

Another instance was finding a photo of my maternal grandparents, with my grandmother obviously pregnant. But she looked too old (from other photos) to be having the baby during the 1910-1920 range, when her 5 kids were born. I happened upon a birth and death certificate of a baby girl, stillborn in 1926. That birth was NEVER mentioned to me, but I was able to piece together a story for that photo. She was pretty far along, so I suspect shortly after that photo was taken, she delivered.



I wish you good luck. Granted, you have obviously lost so many of them that could have been passed down to you, but you may still be able to find some stories worth telling.

 

This is me. I almost always have journaling on my page but it's all very factual. Maybe a few little blurbs about how I felt. If I do a heartfelt journaling page it zaps all of my creative juices.

 

That's one of the cool things about memory keeping. There are so many wonderful ways to do it, and they're all equally valid. If someone doesn't care as much about journaling, cool. If someone writes a novel on every page, cool. There are ways to get more creative or detailed or factual etc., for the people that want to, but there's no one "right" way.