With her permission I’m sharing this letter from a fellow reader. What she says deeply resonates with me and I know it will with many of you as well.
………..
Dear Becky,
I finally got my scanner working again, and went to work on the sticky, gluey falling apart photo album my mom made of my first year so that I could put copies into my Project Life book before the photos degrade even more.
As I really looked at these pictures, something stood out to me. I noticed for the first time that the background of these pictures are all at my grandmothers’ houses, or at events with them. Every single picture of me as a baby was taken by one of my grandmothers, on their cameras. Then they must have sent duplicate prints to my mom.
My parents were too poor to even own a camera, and my mom still found a way to make this little photo album of her baby. Every picture was straight in its spot, with dates written next to the pictures, the occassion and how big I was at certain age milestones. She was capturing little moments of life before they got away from her.
How much was I loved that these three women would make the effort to document my babyhood like that? What a huge gift to me, that I am breathless about almost forty years later. Taking photos and preserving them really does communicate love.
Sincerely,
Heatherle in Portland, OR
Tags: Heatherle, love, old photos, old scrapbooks
What a great reminder of why we scrapbook! Just when I start to wonder “will anyone even look at these pages or care?”, it helps me to imagine my daughter someday looking at the words I’ve written and cherishing the albums I’ve made.
Thanks for sharing!
Heatherle & Becky, thank you for sharing this validation of your family’s time spent loving you this way. My big, gruff grampa was the one to take most of my baby pictures, and, like you, took me 40 years to notice. He’s gone now, and I love him so much more for leaving these memories for me! Enjoy your process! PS. what a cutie you are! Sweet baby pix.
Absolutely…and ladies thats why we scrapbook. Love all this sharing, caring, of things so dear to all of us. Thanks Becky for your blog.
Yes,they communicate love,and bring us happiness & joy…….especially when we can look at those who have come and gone before us.Pictures give us memories,and memories are one thing noone can ever take from you.They last forever……
Absolutely beautiful.
What beautiful, true sentiment. They communicate so much love. I love too that the focus, exposure, none of that matters, it’s just about the beauty and closeness captured. The context is everything.
This sweetness just brings tears to my eyes. Thank you.
I loved this post. I am sitting here with tears streaming down my face. Beautiful!
Thank you.
Loved this! Now, if I can just get my cleptomaniac sister to release MY mom’s album containing photos of BOTH OF US as youth, I’d love to scan MINE in too!
so lovely. thank you both for sharing.
So sweet!! How awesome to have such loving people in our lives!
What a beatuiful and sweet thing to have. I would so love tohave that. My mother passed away about 13 years ago and my aunt and stepfather threw everything away. My mom was a picture person so there would have been lots. So it always makes me happy to see others pictures.
Thanks for sharing. The letter brought a tear to my eye! I hope my children feel the same way when they older and going through the books I made for them.
Thanks for all the great things you share with us Becky!!!!
Thanks for sharing this! I was just thinking the other day that photos, and PL specifically for me at this time of life, is going to allow me to look back on this hectic time in my life with two young, active boys and re-live memories that I simply don’t have time to sit with and cherish now. It’s like freezing these moments in time until the day I can actually sit down and relive and remember these days. Last night, my 5yo son went for a run with his dad…a first! I quickly snapped a photo and then went back to cleaning the kitchen and looking after my 3yo. No time to watch them run, but enough time to freeze the moment to look back on later. Thank you!
A-M-A-Z-I-N-G….this really touched my heart!!
That letter totally made me misty-eyed. It really is a gift of love when you find that someone has cared enough to document things about you when you were young.
In that vein…
My biological father passed away 2 years ago. A couple of months ago I received two priority mail boxes from his widow, my stepmother (with whom I have always had a strained relationship for some reason). She sent me many photos, small albums that I’d made for him of my children and his wedding ring from his marriage to my mother. Another thing that she sent was every letter that I’d ever sent to him and every e-mail that he’d printed out from me, including photos of my children. He wasn’t scrapbooking them, but he was keeping them and for me that was enough of a goodbye (since she allowed me only 10 minutes with him after I’d flown from FL to IN to see him 3 mo. before he passed, while he was still very much aware of what was happening around him… but that’s another story). Anyway… I know that this was her effort to purge me from her life, but MOST IMPORTANTLY to me was that she DID send them to me when she could have thrown them out – and it told me that no matter how sporadic our contact, my father did love me and my children.
I have tons of photos that are the same size as Heatherle’s and from the same era, the 70′s and 80′s and maybe even the early 90′s. Does she mention how she is going use these in the PL 4×6 format? I have 2 PL kits and would love to use one kit for these pictures (my kids when they were growing up) and would love to know what her plans are. I am sure that there are other memory keepers out there with the same question? Maybe Becky has some ideas? If so, please share…
Thank you -
I bought some plain paper at the local scrapbook store, diced it into 4×6, corner rounded and used it as a backdrop for the photos. On some of them I chopped up a journaling card for next to it, and some of them I didn’t. I also did the same thing with the coordinating 12×12 paper in the kit. I also experimented with sewing the 4×6 spots into the smaller size, and then cutting the kit cards with the months on them into a tiny stip to put in the pocket next to the picture. I wasn’t super in love with that, but since I can’t recall being a baby and my mom lives overseas, I figured it cold be more photo album-y than other parts of my childhood. I am posting examples of all this on the Big Picture Scrapbook site in a minute.
God Bless the person who first thought to take pictures of everyday life!! Can you imagine life without pictures??
I love how a picture can bring back a memory….I see it with my 3 year old when she’s looking thru our books, she remembers going to Wisconsin Dells after she looks at the pics and remembers how much fun we had….and asks if we’re going again. I have those same floods of memories when I look at my childhood vacation pictures. My parents really only took vacation pics. Thank goodness I caught the photo bug in grade school…I documented most of my life myself!
This brought tears to my eyes. I believe that taking pictures and documenting them is one of the most loving things I can do for my family. I have already forgotten so many things that have happened since my children were born, so I know how treasured our scrapbooks will be. (and already are). Heatherle, thank you for sharing!
Love, love, love this post and AMEN! I am redoing some of those magnetic page albums, too. Some of our old albums have gone through so much deterioration that it will be extremely hard to salvage the photos. LOTS of love invested in the pages of books passed down, though. So glad we have better materials to use in our books today. Thanks for sharing. GREAT reflections and inspiration.
This made me cry it’s so true. Not just documenting life and taking the time to put the pictures together…BUT…the actual act of taking the pictures. It takes time. It means the photographer values what is on the other side of the lens.
That really touched my heart. It’s really beautiful that you realized that all this time later. Kind of makes it even more meaningful. We can all only hope our children all appreciate what we are working so hard on now… how could they not love it, right!?
how beautiful!
I am the same age and it was my grandma who took all the photos of me also!
all before age: 5!
tara
How appropriate your post was. My mom just passed away. While going through pictures people gave us to put up at the wake I was so sad because not much had a date or the people identified in the photos. Obviously they thought it wasn’t important to label them becasue “they” knew who the people were. Adding the who, what, where and when is the best give you can give the future viewers of your pictures.
Jen
I have a huge stack of photos that I’d love to scan – and more to borrow from my parents, scan and return – does anyone have a recommendation for a scanner? I’d like relatively easy to use – or easy to learn to use – and works with a Mac. I doubt that I’ll want to be able to print very large – but up to 8×10 for some photos would be great.