The Importance of Names and Dates

Audience: Everyone
Category: Layout Techniques
Operating System: Windows 7
Software: Adobe Photoshop CS5

I love getting together over the holidays, especially now that I have kids. It’s so much fun to reminisce and share stories. Invariably, one of the kids will have a homework assignment that requires them to interview a variety of family members about our family history.

My boys are quite blessed that on my side of the family, we’ve only lost my step-grandpa and one of my biological grandpas. Everyone else from that generation and on is still around and actively telling stories. However, that is not the case on my husband’s side. He doesn’t have any grandparents left and has lost both an aunt and his mom.

Unfortunately, the stories on my husband’s side of the family are fragmented and slowly being lost. He has one uncle on each side that remembers some of the stories of the previous generations. However, with his mother’s passing, the family lost many of the stories about my husband and his siblings. Sadly, not only have they lost the stories, but his mom didn’t write on the back of the pictures that she took, so my husband and his twin brother aren’t even sure who’s who in the pictures.

I have four boys, all different ages, so you would think that it would be easy to tell them apart in photos. Dear Son #1 and Dear Son #3 are easily identified. Then, I was blessed with these two goofballs:

importance of names and dates boys

As their mom, I know who’s who – for now. I have to wonder, though, as the years go by, if I’ll continue to be so certain – and what if something happens to me? Even now, my husband can only identify four of the six photos correctly!

Fortunately, I’m a scrapbooker. And best of all, I’m a Scrap Girls scrapbooker! Our designers have gone out of their way to provide hundreds of options for labeling our pages with dates and names. From alphas to brushes to templates and more, we’re blessed with pages and pages of options in the Boutique (just search for “date” to see what I mean).

In my layout below, I chose to type the boys’ names and ages on tags. Then, for the date, I used the perpetual calendar (i.e., it can be edited to work for any year) from ScrapSimple Embellishment Templates: Monthly Special Calendar.

As you’re going through your holiday photos, even if you don’t have time to scrap them right now, take a moment to record who is in each picture. Then, when you scrap them, don’t forget to put their names and the date on the page (and upload them to the Scrap Girls Gallery so we can see which product you chose to preserve those important pieces of information). Your family will thank you someday!

Digital scrapbooking products used: