It was a mess. THANKFULLY about 5 years ago I went on a digitizing craze. During that time I digitized almost all my mom had as far as family photos and documents were concerned. Unfortunately, due to my mad organization skills tons of the photos I had digitized got ruined because they were all together in folders and the dampness of the house made the photographs all stick together. Ironically the ones heaved in drawers were totally fine because they weren't tightly packed. LESSON LEARNED.But after a full weekend of cleaning, sifting, and sorting here's a peak at my mess that I have to sift through now...
Apparently after my uncle passed away my mom had inherited a lot of his documents and photos which also had a lot of family history stuff in there. Look at this gem...
It's a family log from 1901. It has tons of names and dates of births, deaths, marriages, blessings, baptisms, etc...I was so excited to get it digitized. I sneaked a visit into the BYU Family History Library last weekend with my 7 year old to get it done. She appeases my obsession once in a while. Sometime she even pretends to enjoy it with me. The library has some great book scanners, and it was super fun to involve my kiddo, though she insisted that she wasn't actually doing family history work because "it was only pushing a button".
I LOVE finding new treasures! There's lots of other treasures in this pile too...but it'll take some time before I'm able to report on all of them.Bottom line...if I hadn't digitized when I did, I'm certain we would have lost some irreplaceable stuff. Unfortunately we did lose some originals but we have really great digital images of those pictures that we can print, copy or share. Yes, it's a lot of work and it requires some planning, but it's worth it. So if you haven't yet digitized your stuff and you'd like some guidance on where to start, check out my post about DIY Digitizing.
