Digitizing Old Letters and Papers

        I am a sentimental junkie.  My younger self even more so, and as a result I have piles of old pictures, letters, notes from middle school, and receipts (yes, receipts) and travel brochures from Disney World (these item seemed vital to me at age 8).  I have developed a much more discerning taste as time crept by, so I want to discard the lesser sentimental to Simplify (a subject that I read about tons and shop for items to simplify simplifying... ) my life.  I've just begun the tedious task of photographing old letters and notes, when I have a fantastic idea.  I will "digitize" the piles of journals and old pictures and then upload them into the Day One app.  I hope that the end product will be a sort of framework of my past- all letters and entries self written as well as letters sent to me of similar dates.  Per usual, a cool idea has ballooned into a massive undertaking that I'll try really hard to see through to the end!

So far, I've:
1.  pulled out all the papers, letters and cards.
2.  take photos on cell phone of sentimental things, throwing out the most after digital copy is made
3.  keep papers that are epic or grandma's signature- important love letters... The size of the paper collection is drastically downsized. (*this is key- I'm not ditching All the artifacts, but I feel contentment and peace of mind tossing stuff when I know there's a digital copy.*)

SO- Here I sit- watching many many movies, and taking pictures of old stuff.

My ideas to proceed include:
- upload everything from phone to computer and edit?
- create final edited versions and tag all by date
- pull them into day one

= hopefully a more detailed answer to the occasional question:  What brought me to This place?

Links that helped me arrive to this digitizing plan:

Organize Files... Personal and Professional This I emailed to my teachers, as a great way to organize all the crap for the school year, bonus- we just moved to Microsoft 365.

Helpful Discussion about Journal Archiving  Folks discuss how they feel going through the process of personal documentation- good ideas I wouldn't have considered this early in the project

Here is an example of the image created with camera phone:  This precious letter I should frame, because it was written to me by a Great Uncle of mine.  He was the Greatest preserver of writings, photos, stories, and memories of the old days.  I could go on and on, but that is a story for another day.