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A Special Gift For Mom

A few of my passions are my family, scrap booking and genealogy. A few years ago, I put them together as a gift for my mother.

As my mother's eightieth birthday approached, I knew I wanted to give her something very special to mark this milestone in her life! Through my conversations with her, I knew that she dreaded this birthday a lot! The idea of becoming "ancient" depressed her quite a bit.

I decided to put together a Memory Book for her. The trick would be how to compile eighty years of memories in book form and have it NOT seem like an obituary!

I wrote to every family member and friend that I could find an address for and told them about my project. I invited them to write about a favorite memory that they had with or about my Mom and asked if they had a favorite photo that they would like to share. I promised that the photos would be scanned and then returned to them.

I was certain that I wanted to include a time-line in the book and began researching all the important events that had occurred during her life. This process was quite time consuming, but at the same time very educational. I guess I never really thought about it before, but when I was born, there were only 48 states in the union!

I began to create a "rough draft" of her book on sheets of paper. Each sheet represented a page in the book. I started going through family pictures that I had collected throughout the years. Luckily for me, my mother had taken tons of pictures and given me copies of many of them!

My mother was thirty years old when I was born and I was thirty when I had my youngest daughter. I devoted a page to the year my mother was born, a page to the year I was born and one to the year my daughter was born. Each page showed who was President of the United States at the time, the movie of the year, the price of a gallon of gas, a loaf of bread, etc. I also included a page for the current year.

Soon, replies to my letters started to arrive. My aunt (Mom's only sister) wrote about their childhood and favorite paper dolls. My cousin, Helen, wrote about her early memories of my Mom and included photos that I had never seen before. I really wanted the book to be a surprise for my Mom and keeping these treasures a "secret" was more difficult than I had anticipated!

I had reserved a page for each of my mother's grandchildren and had photos ready for each page. I just needed their letters in order to place the photos around them. I'm sure my own children, nieces and nephews

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