How to Organize Twenty-eight Years of Photos

My mother is ninety-one years old. I do not have any photos of my childhood. All her pictures are in boxes in the attic. I was determined not to do that to my children. I vowed to keep up with their baby books and photo albums. That worked well for me for the first seven years. After that, I lost the battle to keep up.

I raised four daughters of my own and my stepdaughter. It was a challenge to raise five children: giving them individual attention, taking them to their activities, and getting them to do chores around the house. So, after seven years, my photos began piling up in a large box. It bothered me that they were still in the envelopes that came from the film developer, but I didn't seem to able to find time to organize them. They piled up over the years in my large cardboard box and even moved with us to another state fifteen years ago. Seven years ago, I began making photo books for special vacations and for our family reunions, but the other pictures remained in the large box.

I retired when my husband passed away and decided I would finally have the time to tackle my photo project. I thought about it for another two years and then made a resolution to start the project and do nothing else until I finished it. To say it was overwhelming would be an understatement. I couldn't decide where to begin.

The box was stored in the garage, so I decided to start there. I took five smaller cardboard boxes (I actually used the covers from produce boxes and from boxes of paper that comes in reams) and labeled them for each decade of photos: the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, and for two thousand. I sorted the photos into the boxes until the large box was empty.

Then I sorted the photos in each smaller decade box by year. If the photos were out of the envelopes, I studied the photos to determine in which year they were taken. My goal was to make a photo book for each daughter and one for myself.