The 50-year payoff: When photo albums become memorial stones
Like Joshua’s stones by the Jordan, family scrapbooks help one generation tell the next what God has done
As I went through old family photo albums and scrapbooks this month, it hit me: this was the payoff from 50 years of saving photos, programs, ticket stubs and other pieces of our family life.
For most of those years, the payoff was not obvious.
It took time to take the pictures, get them developed, sort them, label them and put them in albums.
Later, Anne took it to another level with Creative Memories scrapbooks, carefully arranging stories of vacations and school years.
Then the albums went onto shelves.
They traveled with us from house to house. They took up space. They were bulky and heavy. We were glad to have them, but we rarely looked at them.
And then came the iPhone.
Suddenly we were taking more pictures than ever, but preserving them less carefully than ever.
The old point-and-shoot camera gave us 24 or 36 chances on a roll. The iPhone gave us thousands. And we stopped making albums, because all of our photos from the last 20 years are accessible in the cloud.
Well, we stopped making albums the old way. We did use our digital photos to make the occasional album through Shutterfly.
Digitizing everything
As one of my retirement projects, I’ve been digitizing all of our old scrapbooks and photos. I have been using my phone to take photos of scrapbook pages, and I have been removing every photo from albums and sending them off to a service for scanning.
I want my three children and my grandchildren to have easy access to our family history — and I know they’re not going to want to inherit a bunch of oversized albums.
Plus I have a goal: to curate a separate collection of about 100 photos for each core member of my immediate family — 100 that tell my story, 100 for my wife, 100 for each of our children and so on. That number feels about right. Once a collection gets much larger than 100 photos, people tend to lose interest.
I expected the work of digitizing to be slow. I did not expect it to be so moving.
As I went through the albums, I thought: This is why we did the work all those years ago, so that now, as an older man, I can look back over my life and see how richly God has blessed me.
Photos, programs, ticket stubs, letters, postcards, school papers, newspaper clippings. So many items that stirred memories — or even reminded me of events I had forgotten.
Memorial stones
Then I started thinking of Joshua 4.
After God brought Israel through the Jordan River to the Promised Land, he told Joshua to have one man from each tribe take a stone from the riverbed and set it up as a memorial.
Joshua then told the people: “When your children ask in time to come, ‘What do these stones mean to you?’ then you shall tell them” about God bringing Israel across the Jordan River on dry ground.
“So these stones shall be to the people of Israel a memorial forever.”
The stones were there so one generation could tell the next generation what God had done.
That is how these albums now feel to me. They are “stones” that tell our story to the next generation.
You are not thinking about legacy when you are driving to practices, taking pictures at school events, or trying to get everyone to smile for one decent Christmas photo. You are just living the life in front of you.
But years later, the ordinary things become memorial stones.
A photo can say: God was faithful here.
A ticket stub can say: This day mattered more than I knew.
A faded program can say: We were together at this event.
The point is not that every memory was perfect. No family album tells the whole truth. There were hard days, tired days, foolish days and painful days that did not make it onto a scrapbook page.
But Joshua 4 reminds me that remembering is part of faith. We remember not because the past was flawless, but because God was faithful.
As much as it is convenient to have everything digitized these days, there is not quite like those old photos you can hold in your hand.
Poignant!, we have the same stash... Long forgotten about. Someday They will be memorial stones for us as well. Thank you Ed for sharing this beautiful piece.