About Photos
Organizing Inherited Or Family Photos
When I inherited three large boxes of photos from my parents, I didn’t know how to start the organizing process. I decided to jump in and sort by family member and theme. I labeled envelopes marked “Mom”, “Dad”, “Brother”, “Vacations”, “Christmas”, “Birthdays”, etcetera and began to madly stuff the photos into the envelopes. I just needed to get the photos categorized—it didn’t need to be pretty.
With literally thousands of photos, some of questionable quality, to choose would have taken me years to complete multiple family album scrapbooks. I made the decision to only include those photos that I really loved. Instead of including all of the photos from each Christmas over the years, I selected only a little over a dozen that summed up the Christmas experience for our family. I tried to show all of the family traditions and any new baby’s first Christmas, but I had to be ruthless in trying to keep it brief. Remember, I still have all of the photos, I’m just not choosing to display them all in an album. Be selective. It will save you time and make your album more interesting.
After I had made my photo selections I placed the photos in sheet protectors along with any notes that I had taken for journaling and patterned paper selections. When I actually began to create pages I decided to start from the beginning. I dedicated a few pages to my Grandparents and included any photos of Great-grandparents that I had. You may find that photos taken a century ago are very small and you can fit many on a single page. I also included a special memory about them, like how my grandmother would save pennies for me in old medicine bottles and give them to me when I visited.
Then came my parents. I made pages of both parents’ childhood, when they met, their wedding and the years before children. If I didn’t know facts for each page then I wrote about stories that my parents had told me about when the first met or how I played dress-up year later in the hat my Mother was wearing.
Then came my brother and my birth, our childhood, birthdays, school years, family holidays and vacations. I labeled the photos on these pages with the years and any journaling that I knew.
Somehow I managed to fit everything into one very large 12”x12” album. I placed the remaining photos in acid free storage boxes and labeled them “Mom”, “Dad” “Holidays” etc.