Your memories, your life experiences, and the way you live your life are what makes you who you are. The older you get, the more valuable your memories and your life story become. Tech Expert Lisa Chang is breaking down why it’s important to keep those photo albums, and how to preserve old memories forever.

For many people, conducting a life review and organizing personal and family mementos can be a therapeutic process. It provides a way to travel back in time and see how the past has made you who you are today. You might even view these memories with a different perspective.

Taking the time to preserve family heritage and share memories also provides a gift to your family, friends, children, grandchildren, and future generations.

Beyond pure sentimental value, family members suffering from dementia or Alzheimer’s disease can also benefit from a collection of historical items to help with memory preservation. These treasures can be used to spark long-term memory and keep the brain active.

Today’s technology allows us to take traditional family record keeping a step further. With many online websites, tools, and software available, you can now leave a permanent digital legacy online, which can include your photos as well as any audio or video recordings.

Here’s how you do it:

Digitize 

Purchase a digital scanner to upload your photographs for digital scrapbooking. This eliminates the danger of losing or damaging your scrapbook and lets you share copies of your photos with your loved ones. You’ll also save loads of space in your drawers!

Create an Instagram or Facebook page

Similar to digital scrapbooking, social media lets you post memories, stories, recipes, travel, or anything you want! This comes with the added bonus of not having to remember the date of an event yourself!

Create a family website

This next suggestion is a collaborative effort. A family website can be added to over the years by a few designated people, and any family member can view it whenever they want. When new children are born, they can be added to the online family tree. When you take a trip, you can upload selected photos to add to your family history.

When a baby is born, create an email address for them

This one is a bit weird, but we swear by it. Create an email address for your child, and email them as they are growing up. Milestones,  photos and feelings can be recorded. Why your child is grown up, give them the login and let them read the development of their life through your eyes. It’s also incredible for you to go back and see what you were feeling through the growth of your child.

Get a Professional

Support a local printer, artist or design business by sending them digitized photos or family information to create an album, story, item or family tree. This is a great way to get a unique relic of your history while also giving back to your community.

Create a YouTube channel

For video memories, turn your old VHS and DVDs into digital files, and upload them to a YouTube channel. You can get a video converted to VHS at Costco or Digital Treasures. You can also do it yourself if you have the right tools!

You can keep this YouTube channel private if you don’t want the videos to show up to strangers. This lets you scroll through your old memories with ease.

However you choose to do it, preserving memories is a healthy, beautiful process that benefits both you and your loved ones. We hope these tips helped get you on the way to becoming your own family historian!

Check out these tools to turn your memories digital: