Meeting the people I never knew

By:Michelle

I have always done scrapbooking of some form, but was introduced to the world of safe scrapbooking a little over a year ago. My mother-in-law to-be at the time gave me a scrapbooking kit for as a Christmas present because she knew I had been keeping a binder with all the planning information for my wedding. She thought a scrapbook would be a good way to store it after the wedding was done and over. Little did she know that scrapbooking would end up taking over my life!
I fell in love with scrapbooking right away because it adds so much to the photographs. I am a self-confessed photo addict. I take too many pictures, and I spend too much money on film and developing - but I cannot stop (and I do not want too)! Being able to journal and create themes and layouts adds so much to capturing the emotions of the photographs. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but it seems to me that a few pictures plus a little journaling, and a little attention to design to bring focus in is worth a billion words.
The most important part about scrapbooking to me is recording our lives. My grandparents died when I was very little, and I cannot really remember that much about them. We did not have any other family around us at all, so I rarely even heard that much about them. There is an ache in my heart to know more about these wonderful people, and I do not want that same hurt to exist for any of my children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren. You never know what the future holds, and it seems to risky not to take even a few minutes just to jot down a few things. When I heard things like "your grandma would have been proud of you", it makes me wonder if she would have. Had she or someone else kept a journal, I would be able to know by her beliefs and passions what she would be thinking about what I was doing. I would be able to know her. We will never meet so many family members because they lived in different generations, but they are still family members - and I want to know them.
I think scrapbooking gives me a place to write the story of my ancestors lives and really lets me know them. I can take stories I hear every now and then, pictures I find here and there, and actually re-create their lives in a way. In this way, scrapbooking has brought me closer to relatives both here and gone, which is something you cannot say for most "hobbies".



Tomorrow at dMarie Daily: What Scrapbooking Means to Me, by Lori Jacobson