I have a small mountain of scrapbooks at my parent&8217;s house in Oxford.

The oldest one isn&8217;t pretty. It wears age spots, tears, a broken cover and the signs of a 6-year-old flipping through it one too many times.

Inside, there&8217;s a newspaper clipping of a little boy in my class cramming pizza down his face. It was a class-wide pizza party and I remember that my parents, my classmates and I were baffled that the newspaper photographer would only focus on one child in the room, when we&8217;d all done well.

But a few pages over in the scrapbook, I got my face time. The photographer at the Oxford Eagle &8212; the one who is still there today &8212; found me making a snowman with the kind of snow we get in the South. You know, a little ice, four white flakes and a lot of dirt and leaves. I think I used a bucket to pack it all.

You can follow the years through the scrapbooks. They&8217;ve got every honor roll listing &8212; the newspaper spelled my name wrong at least half the time &8212; science fair winners, photos from class plays, high school club initiation pictures and the newspaper articles I wrote for the paper in high school journalism class.

As a child I never considered how the newspaper was getting so much information about me. I was, after all, the star of the world, why wouldn&8217;t they assign a full time beat reporter to cover my every move?

A few years in the business and I realize the paper wasn&8217;t so focused on me. The Eagle just had the benefit of great school secretaries, interested parents and concerned citizens who submitted things for publication.

The school sent the newspaper the honor roll and science fair winner listings every few months. Parents took the photos at our club initiations and dropped a copy by the newspaper&8217;s office. And some one affiliated with the school let the Eagle know about our pizza party.

It&8217;s the way a community newspaper works. Now I&8217;m on the flip side, and I need your help filling your scrapbooks.

We at The Democrat haven&8217;t done the best job getting academic news, group photos, social events and the like in the newspaper in recent years. However we want to change that now. If you submit something to us for publication, we&8217;ll do our best to get it printed for the world to see within two weeks.

Many of your submissions will be printed on Wednesdays and Sundays in the Life section of The Democrat. We want more of your life in our Life.

We have a great photography staff, and

Ben Hillyer

is wonderful, but he&8217;s just not quite Superman. He can&8217;t fly, and he can&8217;t be in two places at once. Our photographers just can&8217;t cover everything.

That&8217;s where you come in. It&8217;s easier now than it&8217;s ever been. Everyone knows someone with a digital camera. Take a few shots at your child&8217;s school play, at the church festival or at a social gathering. Try to write down the names of everyone in the photo.

Then, you can either e-mail photos to us, save them on a CD or print them out and drop them by. Include a sentence or two about the event, naming the people pictured.

E-mail them to me at

yournews@natchezdemocrat.com

, mail them to P.O. Box 1447 or just come see us at 503 N. Canal St.

But we want more than just your photos. If you haven&8217;t seen an honor roll from your child&8217;s school in the paper lately, call the school office and give them my e-mail address. Feel free to send us write-ups about the projects of which you and your friends and family are a part. Send us information about upcoming events at your church.

Next thing you know, you&8217;ll have bulging, tattered scrapbooks to keep forever.

We are your newspaper, and we want to be your scrapbook too.

Julie Finley

is the managing editor of The Natchez Democrat. She can be reached at 601-445-3551 or

julie.finley@natchezdemocrat.com