The Importance of Journaling

By Joy Kuoha
Kuoha Designs, Ink!

One of my earliest memories as a child is of my mom and I looking through an old photo album filled with black and white photos of my family. This was the large leather bound book with black velvety pages. Each photo was held in place with those little adhesive photo corners that seem to fall off with age. Some of the photos even had those great little wavy edges and were either faded or yellowed. It seems to me that most of the photos are taken from farther away than the photos we take today, and I remember that most of the faces are hard to recognize sometimes.

The one distinct thing I remember about those old photo albums is that my mom had written in white ink on each of the black pages listing the names, dates and places they were taken. What a wonderful gift that

was from her to me and my children. Because of those permanent words next to the photos, we have a direct link to those ancestors and friends in each of the photos and we have stories to go with them.

I have another old memory from my youth of a trip to my father’s parent’s home in Scottsdale, Arizona. They had photo albums on their shelves and we would take them out and browse through them looking for stories. How sad we were to see the photos of people we didn’t know and no names or dates to go with the faces. My grandparents were quite old and died while I was young, leaving us all to wonder what stories these photo could have told.
 
When I had children, I knew instantly that I would preserve all the memories we could capture. Before I learned to
 
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