You have stories and photos worth preserving and safeguarding
Curious: could you rank your Top 100 most meaningful memories?
A few years ago, my father who was aging into his early ‘90s, told the story of how he met my mother. He was only 20 years old and stationed in Norfolk, Virginia with Navy ROTC for the summer.
She was 18 and attended school at Southern Sem. Her stepdad was a navy captain and they had met during a dance. After the dance was over, mom left and dad realized he didn’t have her phone number. Her maiden name was McCormick, from her birth dad who was killed in action in the South Pacific when she was only four.
My dad always persisted in everything he did, including the way he tracked down my mother. He asked friends who were at the dance who the woman was and when that didn’t work, he tried the school, and found out her last name was McCormick. But she had a stepdad was in charge of a landing craft.
He had pocket change, went to a phone, and called through the phone book. He made several calls and got in touch with a McCormick who just happened to be the wife of the man in charge of the Atlantic fleet.
She answered, my dad told her who he was looking for, and she helped by giving him potential names.
He made more calls and finally settled on “Sutherlin,” the man who became my grandfather, a guy who was gruff and had little time for small talk.
Dad described to me how he grunted, “Hello” and without saying anything else, gave the phone to Pat, my mother.
Amazing how relationships connect almost by chance and weave their way through marriage and birth to impact us.
When I look at their photos, I envision the stories I’ve heard them tell and I want to pass those stories along for my children and grandchildren to learn.
The impact of decluttering
I’ve digitized photos in recent years following Melody’s advice but my wife and I haven’t been decluttering until recently. As we do, I’m understanding something powerful:
When I was little, I didn’t care about my parents’ stories.
Why should I since I was immersed in my own world playing baseball with friends and hiking in the woods. I’d hear my parents talk with others about so-and-so and I’d heard about Donald McCormick and my dad’s dad who was a coal miner, but I didn’t feel a need to stop and learn about them.
Now that my mother passed almost 30 years ago and my dad died in 2025, I’m feeling an urgency to know the most meaningful photos that we have so we can write the stories and have them available for our children, grandchildren, and their children.
Family stories are a continuum
My parents are part of my story, but they’re also connected to my children who are all adopted, different races, and arrived in our home at different ages.
The story of how my mother and father met is part of their story, too, even though the details may seem more distant with the passing of time. But my parents’ relationship and values shaped me, and subtly influences the decision that my wife and I made to adopt out of foster care. That, of course, has shaped my children.
The steps to declutter are relatively easy to follow and I outlined them with Melody in our book Declutter Your Photos, Secure Your Legacy.
1 Bring your photos into one place.
2 Choose the most meaningful ones that you’ll keep.
3 Digitize the keepers using FOREVER® and store them permanently in your FOREVER® digital home.
Just because the steps are easy to follow doesn’t mean that accomplishing the task is easy.
Here are two reasons why:
1 We have far more photos and photo albums than I ever would have guessed. I’ve been stacking the shoeboxes and albums and spent an hour or so on a recent Saturday tossing the ones we don’t want.
2 Our days are filled with family demands and the needs of other people. While most of us are busy, some of us have weightier demands than others, especially with kids and grandkids scattered over an 80-mile area. They range in age from a year old to almost 20 years old. Some have needed extra care and attention this year.
Here’s some of what we’re learning:
1 More cats and dogs pics than kids and grandkids!
In 2024, our then 17-year-old took in two cats and we already had two dogs. In recent months, we’ve taken more photos of our cats and dogs than we have of our kids and grandkids. YIKES!
2 Thousands of informational photos clogging our smartphones
We evacuated from the Eaton Fire that struck Altadena in January 2025 and burned 6,000 homes. Ours survived. My wife was looking through her phone and discovered she had over 4,000 digital images and many of them were related to our insurance claims.
The message in our book is that you can declutter, store your photos permanently and safely, and find the photos and videos with the most meaning so you can share them.
We’re also getting ready to publish our second book in November: Unclutter Your Digital Images, Secure Your Legacy.
Melody’s passion as a photo coach is that you leave your legacy in photos, videos, and key documents so loved one who come after you can piece together their own story—and continue your family line.
Both books have space to jot notes and are filled with inspiring stories and easy-to-follow action steps.
Click here to read a summary.
