Why You Should Journal In Your Scrapbooks

by Audrey Okaneko

We’ve all looked through photo albums. There are page after page of photos. If the photo album belongs to someone else, we often must force a smile as we flip through page after page of photos that mean nothing to us.  Even if the photos are photos of our relatives or closest friends, if we weren’t there, seeing hundreds of photos of someone else’s trip or someone else’s party can be a bit unexciting.

Journaling is what makes scrapbooks different than photo albums. Even if you wanted to journal in a photo album it would be tough. There is no space. There is just enough room to put your photos. Scrapbooks have entire blank pages that you can put both words and photos onto.

Journaling helps us and whoever else might be viewing the scrapbook know what the photo is, who the people in the photo are, what year the photo was taken and even how the photo taker felt about the photo.

If you come from a large family, you might have many photos showing a beautiful buffet table. Without journaling, it’s almost impossible to know if this buffet was from Thanksgiving or Mom and Dad’s surprise anniversary party.

Maybe this was the year that Uncle Tom had surgery and was not at the party. Just one line of journaling can trigger your memory reminding you that Uncle Tom was not there.  You can even use a sticker of a hospital and underneath, write “Uncle Tom”. Not all journaling has to be long and detailed. Those two words are enough to tell the story. If I were to look at a friend’s scrapbook and see a hospital with the words “Uncle Tom”, I might ask if Uncle Tom was in the hospital, or I might ask for the rest of the story.

Over the years, I have taken many photos of those I’ve met on my travels. When my kids were small, I would strike up conversations with other moms. When we have taken trips, we’ll strike up conversations with others on the tour, or with others visiting the same attraction we are visiting.

Without some minor journaling as to who these people are, and where we met them, that memory might be lost.

My sister made a scrapbook for my daughter, showing every birthday party from the first up until about the 13^th. Without the year the photos were taken in this scrapbook, it would have been very tough to know the 3^rd party from the 4^th, or the 8^th from the 9^th. My sister added either a year to the page (as a title), or the actual age of my daughter that year, so we knew exactly how old she was throughout the scrapbook. Some pages the years were hand written and some years were done with stickers.

Words tell the who, what, where and when of the photographs. Try adding a few words of journaling to each of your scrapbook pages and see if the results have both you and others smiling as you flip the pages.