Ancestry Magazine

Scrapbook material has a remarkable way of capturing time, place, culture, and most of all, the personalities of the people involved.

Only a few pages from my grandmother’s scrapbook survive, but those remnants provide a glimpse of a young woman in the 1890s. I can only wonder why she saved a small blue ticket for the “New York & Brooklyn Bridge Promenade,” but it’s easier to see why she kept a photo post card of herself with a happy-looking group at Coney Island. Eight tintypes on a page, still firmly glued to gray paper, show her dressed up and stiffly posed with several unidentified people. On another, she’s outside standing by a huge American flag and a cloth-covered table with flowers and food. Among the other items that made it through the years are two invitations. One was for a sleigh ride to take place 7 February 1895; the other was for a dance and was addressed to her in my grandfather’s distinctive handwriting. My grandfather said that the dance invitation was a keepsake of their first date. I look at the time-yellowed card now and wonder if it was a memento of the night they fell in love. I’ll never know, but it’s clear that memories in this book were the ones my grandmother chose to save.

My grandmother’s scrapbook was left unfinished. She died of typhoid at the tender age of thirty-eight, leaving five children under the age of twelve. These pieces of her life were carefully preserved by my grandfather and found with his possessions when he died in his eighties.

Sadly, my mother never left us a scrapbook. She worked from the time she was a young girl and had to go back to work again when my father left her a widow with six children under the age of twelve. My grandfather took me to Texas to live with my mother’s sister and her family when I was twenty-two months old. When I was eleven years old, my aunt and uncle took me back to New York to meet my mother and brothers and sisters for the first time. My aunt understood that the trip was to be something I’d savor for the rest of my life. To prepare for it, she bought me a red-covered scrapbook that I have to this day. A crushed seashell serving as a memento of my first trip to the ocean, a post card of the Statue of Liberty, a ticket stub from our visit to the Empire State Building, and fading photographs of my family dressed in 1950s garb are among the items that have been pressed between the pages all these years.

Recently, I found vacation scrapbooks that my daughters and I hadn’t looked at since we put them together in the 1970s. We included post cards of places we passed through on our way to visit relatives. There are headlines clipped from a newspaper when Apollo 15 was making a lunar landing and of the traffic jam we got caught in with hippies who were heading to Woodstock. There’s a photo of the Partridge Family as well as photographs of our heavily packed panel station wagon and of cousins, aunts, and uncles my girls were meeting for the first time.

As family historians, we’re usually very good at documenting lives with censuses, vitals, and all manner of records because they give us a foundation on which we can build. Yet often we forget the importance of “scrapbook material.” Even if we don’t have the time, the inclination, or the resources to create a masterpiece, we can at least gather and preserve bits and pieces of the world that surrounded our ancestors. Historical newspapers, local histories, and old photo collections are just some of the many ways in which we can breathe life into the people in our family histories.