My inherited family album sits in pride of place in my bookshelf. I love it.
A weighty tome, with gold edged pages, thick card inserts and beautiful watercolour decorated frames around each photo.
Photos of stiff Victorian men, and women in amazing dresses and headgear look out at me from the pages.
Getting your photo taken back in the day was not a 5 minute task, it was an occasion.
It involved making time on your precious day off, putting on your Sunday best clothes and taking a trip to a photographers studio... probably by train or 'charabang' to the nearest town....
...and it would have been pricey too, this new fangled photography thing.....
My family clearly valued the photos, and spent time and money making the album. If I were to take it to the Antiques roadshow the experts would have seen one like it a hundred times, its not worth much....
BUT..... for all the money and time they spent making the album they forgot one thing....
The writing.... of course, they knew who everyone was, they had no need to write names with the photos....?
.....or note down that Fred had signed up for the army,
or that William and Jane had a new baby called Rose?
or talk about the family tradition on July 1st,
or what their favourite dinner was,
or what dads nickname was...
or that Ann loved to sew and made the cloth for the church pulpit,
or about that prank that Joe played on his brothers one summer....
...all those memories are lost, because they didn't write them in the album.....
I'm guilty of this as much as the rest of us..... its time to change....
Lets make journalling a priority, not an afterthought...