Why I scrapbook..

That is sad. You don't have to be a scrapbooker to be a photo taker. Some of us merge the 2, but I have lots of family who don't scrapbook. They do take lots of photos though.

I think about this sometimes and wonder if future generations will say the same about videos. They're becoming so common now, and coming technology will allow all of us to wear cameras all the time and record any/all the moments of our days. I have just a handful of DS. I wonder if his children will wonder where all the videos are!?

My husband would be hard pressed to find 30 photos of his childhood.

I'm 50 and that sounds about right for how many childhood photos I have also. It wasn't something all families took or could afford. I'm sure there are families today that don't take a million photos.

My husband who is 52 has 2 photos as a baby and only 1 as a child. He is the youngest of 7 and he was a late in life child. But his mother has books upon photo books of pictures of her doing a little bit of everything but very few of her children.
I scrapbook and am the family photo taker. I am working on trying to get myself in some of the pictures. And i was lucky my mom took lots of photos.

That's me, there are maybe a dozen photos up until I was 5 then nothing until 9th grade.  My family was going through a difficult time, money was tight and they couldn't afford to develop the film.  Then the camera broke, so that was that.  My siblings pooled their money to buy them a new camera for Christmas, but they had so gotten out of the habit of taking photos that there are very few until my sister got married.  That is why I went photo crazy when my kids were younger.  I only have 5 photos of my father ranging from between 1st  grade and graduation.   

Well...makes you really treasure those 30 photos I'm sure! My dad is in his 70s and has absolutely zero of his childhood. When I was growing up oddly enough my dad always had a camera. But they weren't cheap back then. Now mind you 20 year difference between my dad and your husband but still cameras weren't an every one owns one type thing. Not like today's standards.

When my oldest son was born my husband was supposed to take some photos.  Well he couldn't get the camera off zoom so I have two totally zoomed up facial shots of son and that's it.  I showed him a bazillion times how to take pics with that camera - a point and shoot.

When DS 2 came along I wanted it videod.  I set up the camera and said to DH, just turn it on when the baby is coming.  Did he?  No.  and not because he forgot in the excitement.  He just didn't want to.  He pushed the button after the baby was born but I had it directed toward the end of the bed so all you hear is voices.   If I had been in charge of filming it would be a whole different story.  But I was busy having HIS child.

Can you get him to write about, or tell you about his memories of growing up? In the end it is the memories in the scrapbook that really make the difference.

When my kids were small, I had a film camera and not a lot of time. After photos taken each month of the first year for each child, I took photos at Christmas and on birthdays, and not all of them turned out. There are a couple of years, right after we moved and I had an extra couple of hours added onto each work day for travel that I seem to have very few photos.

I wonder about all the photos that are taken today and "posted" somewhere, yet never printed. As technology changes, the new platforms make it difficult or impossible to read the older files, so I am not confident that electronically saved photos will always be available.

My husbands mother was/is a documenter. Now he's the firstborn so naturally everything was documented! She took Polaroids every week and write EXACT ages, his and then later his brother and sister. So he appreciates my scrapbooking.

One of our dear friends had some sort of virus in her brain a few years ago that caused her to lose a lot of her memories, permanently. She's completely healed now but the lost memories won't be recovered. She gets my obsessive need to document. One of my fears in life besides a kid getting hurt is Alzheimer's or some sort of memory loss. So yeah I date everything and even if it's obvious which child is in the picture, I still write it down. What if I die and they can't figure out who is who? (They all 3 look freakishly alike).

I am 50, was the first child, and there are less than 20 pictures of me as a kid. Makes me kind of sad too.

My dad was born in 1925 and grew up poor in England. I have TWO photos of him prior to his marriage to my mum in 1969...one from 1944 in his military kilt during the war and one from 1965 - a snapshot of him on his 40th birthday. That's it. No childhood photos at all. I doubt his family had a camera and I know they couldn't afford to have professional photos taken.

My mother was born in 1936 and grew up middle class in the States. There aren't a ton of photos of her childhood but there are some and she had a camera by the mid-1950s (late high school or early college)and there are lots of photos of MY childhood (b. 1970) because she made a point of taking pictures - the first few years are mostly black and white because it was cheaper. By the time my sister came along (b. 1974) they are all colour.

I've never seen a photo of my older sister (b. 1950) as a child though - I don't know if there weren't any or if Dad just didn't ever get any of them (her mum and our dad separated when she was 5). The oldest photo I have of her/have seen of her is from her wedding when I was a toddler.

DH has some photos from his childhood - 30 doesn't sound like an unlikely number and that'll include school photos. He was the youngest of 7 and his parents separated when he was a toddler so he was raised by his mum. Every now and then one of his (close-in-age) nieces or nephews will unearth a photo that he's in - when one niece's grandma on the other side died, a couple of photos she had were of DH.