Easy Mother’s Day Gift

The top gift anyone could ever give me would be ‘more time’.  If someone sold time at a store – I would be their best customer.  For Mother’s Day this year, that is what I have decided to give my mom – my time.  I am taking a long weekend to go to my parent’s house to spend time helping her organize our family photos.  Since my children were born she and I don’t spend as much mother-daughter time together as either of us would like.  It isn’t a sexy gift – but talk about practical…and way more fun to do with someone else than by yourself!  She has been trying to organize her photos for months and dealing with digital photos, old photos from when she was young, 35MM photos/negatives from the 80s etc…She is overwhelmed.

There is no one size fits all system, so our first step was to acknowledge that and stop looking for one.   Each generation of photo taking has been different and the items needed to organize are different.   For this many years worth of photos, starting to organize by year makes the most sense.  This way everything is organized by date until she decides what she wants to do for a specific project or album. We have a plan of attack for each different type of photo and I will share pictures and our tips and tricks when we are done – hopefully there may be a few ideas that will help those of you struggling with the same thing.

I will have as much fun doing this as mom will getting it done!  A girl’s day of reminiscing about family memories and a chance to help mom get organized.  Win – Win.  Despite my chronic complaint that I don’t have enough time to keep up with my photos – I love the process of keeping memories.  So, Happy Mother’s Day (early) to those of you family historians who take the time to keep memories for your family…your children’s children will thank you.