Many homes have boxes and books full of old photographs and souvenirs from family holidays and special events like wedding parties and birthday celebrations.
However, over the last decade, it has become more common for photos to exist online on social media accounts or on the hard drives of smartphones and the memory cards of digital cameras. This may seem convenient, but if your pictures are stored solely online, they are out of your control. You may think they are safe, but if you misplace your account’s login details or the website you use suffers a hack or goes bankrupt, then you may lose years of memories with no chance of recovering them. If you lose a memory card from a digital camera or a computer hard drive malfunctions, thousands of photos could be lost forever.
Having a physical copy of your favourite and most important photographs to have and to hold can give you an irreplaceable family heirloom for you to enjoy and pass on to the younger generations of your family, giving them a physical connection to their own family history.
Here we are going to look at a few of the most important reasons to create a family photo book that can be passed down through the generations of your family, helping future generations look to the past to see who and where they came from.
The Importance of Your Family’s History
Many people, particularly as they reach middle age and have children of their own, begin to wonder about their family’s past and the journey that the generations of their family have taken through the years.
Important family stories can be very enlightening to family members, and can also help young children to more greatly appreciate of what they are a part of and see how they are a link in a chain of people that may have crossed great distances or hardships to give them the opportunities that they have today.
Family histories provide a window to a collective past that can help bring a large family closer as they can look back and see how closely connected they really are, often by important figures who made decisions that have helped shape everyone’s destiny; such as grandparents or great-grandparents that emigrated across continents to create a better life for themselves and the generations of their family that followed.
A Picture Can Speak a Thousand Words
Words and stories can be very powerful but leave a lot to the imagination. Family stories are often passed by word of mouth from family member to family member, and from generation to generation, and sometimes important details can be lost or embellished over time.
Having photos to illustrate these stories can help separate the facts from the fiction and offer a window to the past to help family members, especially young children, imagine their collective history much more accurately and authentically.
Creating a photobook isn’t difficult, particularly if you are using photographs that have already been uploaded to the internet on one site or another. There are a number of excellent sites like Photobook Deals that offer comparisons on high-quality photo books from well-known brands, sometimes offering a photo book discount that makes the opportunity of creating a family history too good to miss.
Make Lasting Memories Last Several Generations
The story of your family’s history will often be punctuated by important events like holidays, wedding celebrations, and the anniversaries and birthdays of the older generations.
Events like these will often be pivotal in your family’s history and be tied to stories that future generations will find enlightening and informative when they begin to explore their history. Memories of these events will often be important to present generations too, as well as the future ones, and having a book or document that preserves these memories can be invaluable to a family’s members; especially if they couldn’t be present at the events because of work or other commitments.
Though convenient, social media sites and hard drives may be outside of your control and leave you with little recourse if your important family photos are lost or deleted.
Having a family photo book that is professionally made and hardwearing can give you copies of your photos that you can keep safe and are preserved for the younger generations of your family. It makes a lot of sense to have permanent, physical copies of your favourite and most important family photographs, not just to prevent their loss, but also to create a lasting document that can be passed down through the generations of your family that will follow you.
Hopefully, this quick guide has given you the information and inspiration you need to build a photo book that you can create for your whole family, not just your present family but also your family in the future.
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