For a long time, I thought of social media as something temporary. A quick post, a photo shared in the moment, a little update that disappears down the feed as life keeps moving.
Then my daughter passed away in 2019, and everything about the way I looked at social media changed.
We lost a bunch of the photos from her phone. Like anyone would, I immediately went to her social media hoping to find some of them. I was looking for pictures, but what I found was something even more meaningful.
Her social media was not just a place where she had shared photos. It was a look at life from her point of view.
Her thoughts on a given day.
The things she thought were funny.
The people she loved.
The moments she chose to save.
The little pieces of her personality that came through in the captions, comments, selfies, screenshots, and posts.
It was not just documentation of what happened. It was documentation of how she saw it.
That realization changed the way I think about scrapbooking.
We spend so much time trying to preserve the big moments: birthdays, holidays, vacations, school events, milestones. Those things matter, of course. But social media often holds the smaller, more personal pieces of the story. The inside jokes. The random Tuesday thoughts. The favorite song lyric. The blurry selfie. The “this made me laugh” moment. The tiny crumbs of personality that are easy to overlook until you realize they are part of the whole person.
Since then, I have slowly been documenting pieces of my daughter’s social media, and I have also started saving bits from my other children’s accounts too. Not in a nosy way. Not to embarrass them. But because someday those little glimpses may matter more than anyone realizes right now.
I have even saved a few screenshots from my own social media to scrapbook later, because my thoughts and ordinary days are part of the story too.
If you are a memory keeper, social media can be a surprisingly rich source of scrapbook material. Screenshots of posts, captions, comments, playlists, texts, memes, profile pictures, or little updates can all become meaningful pieces of a page. They can help show not just what someone looked like or where they went, but what they cared about, what made them laugh, what they were thinking, and how they moved through the world.
A few ideas to document:
- A favorite post or caption
- A screenshot of a funny exchange
- A profile photo from a certain season of life
- A playlist, meme, or quote they shared
- A “day in the life” style page using social media snippets
- A page about their humor, hobbies, friendships, or current favorites
- Your own posts and thoughts, because your story belongs in your albums too
You do not have to document everything. You do not have to make it perfect. Sometimes one screenshot, one photo, and a few lines of journaling are enough to hold a memory in place.
For me, social media became more than a feed. It became another kind of memory box.
And sometimes, tucked between the selfies and silly posts, you find the pieces of a story you did not even know you would need.
