Recently I was faced with some big decisions regarding my layouts and albums. I needed to make some choices on whether or not someone and some photographs would appear in our family scrapbooks. Have you ever had a photograph and wondered if it should go on your layout or not or even if it matters?
My decision was based on a very hurtful thing that this individual did to my family. There is not one single family member (there are seven of us) that wanted to see her face in our albums. This proposed a problem for me because I have known this individual for well over 15 years. She has been a part of many events, many family celebrations and more. She is not family.
Thankfully, my family helped me decide what was best and we decided she and her family members should not appear in our albums, unless this photo make-up (meaning the main perspective of the photograph) included our family members and the story might not be told the correct way without that photograph. It was easy to go through my albums and pluck out the pages that contained only her family and events. I saved all of the embellishments and threw away the rest.
But what happens when it is simply a photograph that you are wondering about? Maybe the person didn’t cause any friction. Maybe the person is simply someone you don’t know well, or maybe it is an ex-girlfriend or boyfriend of someone close to you. The bottom line on all of this, is that including a questionable photograph in your albums is your choice. It is a personal choice, and one that should be made with proper thought and consideration for other family members.
I actually sat down and created layouts about my ex-husbands marriage to his current wife. This was indeed a personal journey on my part, as I accepted her place in my children’s lives as their step-mother. It is a really interesting experience when I am sitting with my children and flipping through that years album and we come across that layout. They were in the wedding, so the questions aren’t there anymore, but at the beginning they wondered why I did it when I wasn’t even there. I explained to them both in person AND in the journaling on the page that I did it because it was a special event that occurred in their lives and that my albums contain everything that happens to all of us.
So, do you include photographs of people you no longer communicate or talk to?
Nicole Humphrey writes articles for the Scrapbooking Blog and for the Frugal Blog. She also guest blogs on a variety of topics. You can read more of her articles by clicking here.
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