A Memoir Blog Can Provide Immediate Satisfaction

Memoir Blog

Photo Credit: ©vesnacvorovic/Bigstock.com

My mom had surgery last week and I’ve been helping her out during the recovery. Now that she’s feeling a little better, she wants us to go through the boxes of “stuff” in the basement that she inherited upon the passing of my grandmother and my uncle. It’s a difficult task to wade through the memories of a lost loved one and even more difficult to throw away things that might have been meaningful to him or her.

In a box of my uncle’s things, we found photos, certificates and newspaper clippings about his baseball career. Mom went through it all and carefully extracted the things she found interesting and tossed the rest. I’m not exactly sure of her plan at that point, but I got the idea that somehow everything would be going into a smaller box and back to the basement. She knew and I knew what would happen if it simply went back to the basement.

There are people in our family who might be interested in looking at some of this stuff, but they are scattered across the country. My mind was searching for an easy way to share it right now with those who might be interested. If that box goes back to the basement, its contents will likely never be appreciated or even viewed again. Well, I had an idea…

I quickly bought a domain and installed WordPress, an easy to use website content management platform. In other words, I was creating a website for my mom and any other family members to use to share whatever they wanted. Streamlining the process was going to be the key to making this work.

Scanning this stuff would take forever, so the plan was to take photos of articles, photos and certificates. “It doesn’t need be perfect, just get it done! The keys for doing this quickly are having good natural light and holding the camera fairly level so there isn’t much distortion. We used Mom’s iPad to take photos and although it is possible to use the iPad crop tool and the WordPress app to quickly get these posted to our new website, we decided to move the photos to the computer where we could crop and straighten using Windows Live Photo Gallery.

Now Mom is learning how to use WordPress to create a family scrapbook that can be shared with her siblings, nieces and nephews. I’ll be creating how to’s and videos on the details of how this works, so stay tuned.

*Affiliate commissions help us to cover the costs of updating and maintaining this website. An affiliate link is a link to a product offered by a third-party that may result in a commission credited to this website. See our Full Disclosure Statement.
Web Analytics