The Family Memory Keeper

Hi everyone, this is Sarah. I am the digital photo manager at Signature Photo Organizing. Believe it or not, but outside of my job here, I have been spending my free time digitizing and organizing my whole family’s photo library. Working on my own family’s images has made me realize, even more so, how important this job is.

Last summer, my mom and I took a trip to visit my grandma. While we were there, she started pulling out boxes and boxes of prints, albums, letters, old newspaper clippings, her journals, graduation announcements, paintings she had made, and more. Nearly 80 years’ worth of her life was laid out in front of us, and she was showing us her life story.

My grandma had 7 kids, nearly 20 grandkids, and now a few great-grandkids—so you can imagine the scale of media she has been holding onto. Every graduation announcement from a grandkid, every holiday card from her kids, photos of my mom and her siblings growing up (many of which I had not seen), and much, much more. My grandma has been the family memory keeper, and she has now passed that role down to me.

I am a pretty sentimental person by nature, so the role of family memory keeper is one I don’t take lightly. Not only are these photos and memorabilia priceless family heirlooms, they are the pieces that make up my grandma’s life, my mom’s life, and even my life.

Grandma

Grandma & Mom

Grandma & I

For my senior project in college, I created a video collage using color scopes to represent the residue that each person’s life leaves behind. These photos, these memories, are exactly that. They are the pieces of us that will long outlive us. Even in my own family’s photo collection, there are images of people I have never heard of and who are long gone. Despite not knowing them, I feel a connection to them. They took part in getting me here today, and I feel as though the least I can do to thank them is to remember them.

Grandpa, Mom, & I

On the other hand, there are some who are not so long gone, and in preserving these photos, I have been able to preserve their memory. My grandpa passed a few years ago, and it has been an absolute delight seeing photos of him as a young boy and learning more about his family. He was an engineer, smart as they come, and his family used to call him Buzz growing up (something I did not know until recently). In the time we know people, we only learn so much, like seeing the tip of the iceberg above water. In going through old photos and memories, we are able to learn a little more.

What I have learned from both my own family’s collection and our clients’ family collections is that photo organizing is more than just scanning in prints or tagging people in your digital photo library. It is a way to learn more about the people and the events that all fit perfectly together to bring you to where you are today. It is a way to preserve their life stories, and your life story. It is a way to learn more about yourself (I’ve learned my creativity and sensitivity have come from my grandma).

So, ask your grandma to give you those old prints! Ask her if she journaled or wrote letters in her life. Ask her to tell you the stories that go along with each photo. Ask her if you can become the family memory keeper.