With our seemingly ‘always busy’ personal lives, most of us don’t have time to capture and preserve our family memories and milestones. And we often curse ourselves for it later on. Although the task of preserving the ‘a-ha’ family moments may sound complex, the endeavor doesn’t have to be fancy to be effective.
Don’t just print out photos or place them in a file (or – even worse – leave them on your smartphone). Make sure your treasured moments are kept in a way that your family can enjoy them in the future.
Here are a few imaginative ways to safeguard the treasured moments of your family without spending an exorbitant amount of time or breaking the bank:
Video biography
A video biography is not only great for preserving family stories, but also your family’s image, personality and voice – something only videos can reproduce. Make a video including you and the whole family responding to questions. Talking is usually easier for the kids than writing stories down, and you’ll be glad later that you saved your family’s voice and image in addition to preserving memories.
It could be simply holding a hand-held video recording with the family sitting around after Christmas or Thanksgiving Dinner and sharing their favorite moments. Or, if going out on special occasions is your family’s style, you could have a videotaping session, with the videographer coming to where your family wants to be taped, with a professional audio, video and lightning equipment.
Family portrait
This option is great for photo enthusiasts in the family. It offers a getaway from the traditional photo albums and portraits can be organized in several different ways documenting everything the family does. Those shoeboxes full of dusty props, and family monuments no one has looked at for years, are waiting to spring back to eternal life in these portraits.
The idea is to document the special moments and occasions in addition to all the mundane things that you do. Portraits can be specific to every season, such as family holiday portraits for the holiday season, family summer portraits for the summer season, and more. The special moments can be captured and kept forever with family portraits and can also be used on photo card designs, which will make sharing the spirit of every season easy.
Art journal
Art journal is a creative way for every family member to express through writing while allowing you to maintain the visual aspect of a scrapbook. Keep those photos, keepsakes and other important scraps and organize them in your own creative freestyle family journal that can be passed onto generations.
As art journalism allows for different mediums, including stamps, collage, paint, template and anything else your imaginations ties with, it enables a more everything goes kind of opportunity. So you and the family can document your life via art and still paste your photos and write about memories in your life through art journaling.
Memory Box
Making a memory box is one of the easiest ways to keep track of all remarkable memories and milestones achieved by your family. All it requires is some index cards, an index card box and dividers. The months of the year can be labelled and then index cards can be divided to create sections.
The box can be kept in a visible place so that whenever something memorable happens, you can write the year and date and a sentence or two describing exactly what happened on an index cards. The cards can be moved back to the box at the end of each month so that you always have fresh cards waiting when a new memorable moment occurs.
