Journaling is important because it answers the Who? What? When? Where? and Why? of your page.  Journaling doesn’t just have to be writing little stories, although these are nice. There are many ways to do journaling. Your headlines or heading can be journaling. You can use stencils or stamps to create your journaling space. You can leave empty space on your page and then fill it in with a mounted journal entry, which can be printed from your computer, stamped, handwritten or typed. If you are having trouble writing something, you can use quotes, sayings and poems to illustrate your point.

It is always nice to know who is in the pictures. For example, you have a picture of three children dressed in costumes. Through journaling, you document the children’s names; Jake, Sarah and Quintin, where they are; the library, why they are there; a Halloween story session; and when; October 2004. You can also add some anecdotes about what happened at this event.

Unfortunately, we don’t always know the same people all our lives and it is nice to look at a picture twenty or thirty years down the road and know who is in it with you. My mother has plenty of pictures of my siblings and I, when we were children, with other kids. However, we don’t remember people in the pictures or where we were. If she had been aware of journaling, we would know the answers to the questions we now ask.