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Obviously, beautiful photographs are near and dear to our collective Southern Weddings heart… photos of our own families, and of our families-in-the-making, and of the hundreds of couples who share their most precious moments with us every year! The desire to document life beautifully doesn’t end with a wedding, which is why we’re always eager to hear how others keep up with preserving photos and memories in the digital age. We’re happy to welcome our friend Jenny Collier today to learn more about how she records the life of her growing family! – Emily

I began journaling my family shortly after my husband and I were married. Living in California at the time, I started a blog to keep my family back home informed of what was going on in our lives. At the end of my first year I used a website called Blurb to turn my blog into a book, and from there, my fascination with memory keeping began.

When I received the book in the mail I absolutely poured over it — it contained all of our precious memories in one little package. From then on, I made it my mission to continue to write the story of our lives; eight years later I am still journaling and turning those memories into books. They are my most treasured items, because they tell our stories: of moving back home, building our family business, my pregnancies, and our children’s lives – their milestones, funny words, and so much more.

I teach a photography class for moms and often bring these books along with me to share. So many of my students have started this tradition for their own families, but every single one of them wishes they had started it sooner. I hope hearing about my process at this point in your journey might be helpful for y’all!

There are so many really beautiful ways to preserve your memories these days in book form – I know the Southern Weddings team adores Artifact Uprising, and I do, too! Shutterfly and MPix also have great book options. Today, I wanted to explain my process, which starts out with a blog. I use Blogger, a free blogging platform, to record my memories. My blog is set to author-only (so no one can see it but me) and is solely used to create the end product, which are my beloved coffee table memory books. Once a month, I sit down and compile our photos and memories into posts. Each event gets its own post; I also share our Instagram photos for each week in separate posts.

I also create a monthly post for each child with the things they said and did that month. Since these have essentially become my children’s baby books, I rely on these pages to jog my memory of when they hit certain milestones!

At the end of the year, I use Blurb’s blog-to-book option to create my keepsake. Just an hour or two of work for me per month is so worth it when I receive that book in the mail – especially when my little ones can now pour over our memories from the year themselves!

Thank you so much, Jenny!! In honor of memory keeping everywhere, the kind folks at Artifact Uprising have offered up a $100 gift certificate to their site. We adore Artifact’s clean design and flexible software – PERFECT for timeless wedding albums that will start you down the road of documenting your family’s life! Use the Rafflecopter below to enter.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Tell us: How do you preserve your family’s memories? Did you order an album from your photographer? From somewhere else? As your family grows, do you or do you plan to print out photos every year, or make an album for, say, every five years? We’d love to hear!

emily Written with love by Emily
2 Comments
  1. avatar Kristy reply

    This is genius! I never knew there was an option like this out there. Thanks so much for this, Jenny! I now have a new project.

  2. avatar Southern Weddings Weekly Round-Up + Happy Birthday, Morgan! – Southern Weddings Magazine reply

    […] blue in a Southern summer–gorgeous! We’re giving away $100 to Artifact Uprising! Enter here. Nicole shared a day in her life–this gal has hustle! We rounded up our favorite ACC-inspired […]

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