by: Emad Fakhoury

Hidden away at home, you may have a cupboard or drawer full of irreplaceable photos of your children, parents, old friends, grandparents and great grandparents. More than likely there will be a stack of 100 year-old sepia pics of elaborately costumed, austere relatives whose names and family associations have long been forgotten.

There is no way you could ever throw them away - but what do you do with them? You have a constant nagging feeling that you really should save them for future generations – create a link to the past that your children, grandchildren and great grandchildren can treasure.

You may have heard of a new craze called ‘scrapbooking' which does just that. But it's as much about preserving today's memories for future generations as it is about preserving our past.

‘Scrapbooking' is more than just organising photos. It's about displaying them attractively, preserving other interesting bits & bobs like concert programs, tickets, newspaper articles and, most importantly, ‘journaling' so that in years to come anyone who looks at your scrapbook will know who you are and where you were when the photographs were taken. You are capturing and storing a little piece of history about yourself, your life and your family.

Scrapbookers can now go one step further in their efforts to preserve their memories. New digital print technology has dramatically reduced the cost of printing one off bound books. This means you can design and edit your own photographic books using digital pics, scanned images, captions and text and have it professionally printed and bound at a fraction of the price it would have once cost.

A new website called cherishworld.co.uk offers free downloadable software that allows you to create photobooks on your computer using your own digital and scanned photographs or images, add text captions and journaling. You then send this to cherish via the web and they will send you back a professionally printed, bound book of your family history and memories in your own choice of cover styles and colours. And it's not expensive – no more than many off-the-shelf photo albums. Cherish can also print personal greeting cards, calendars and posters providing even more ways to make the most of your family pics.

Everything you need to know is available on the web – so get scrapbooking and be a part of making our generation the most documented and remembered in history.