Preserving history: Southeast Texas scrapbookers tell family stories with style, flair
The aged scrapbooks that cradle the story of Nora Hudnall Runnel’s life crumble and slip through her daughter’s hands like ashes, detritus left by the decades-long disintegration of a family’s pictorial history.
For Mamie Bogue, 69, the photos her mother carefully tucked into tiny corner points are worth preserving as part of her legacy to her own children.
Thanks to heavy marketing and improved materials - and maybe a new definition of family - old-time scrapbooking has become a modern mania for people like Bogue who give a venerable tradition new dimensions.
A 2005 study by the Craft and Hobby Association, based in Elmwood, N.J., found that 12.9 million U.S. households participated in scrapbooking that year, generating $2.5 billion in sales. The study projects a 3 percent household scrapbooking growth for 2006, said Loren Barrows, marketing manager with the association, in a telephone conversation.
The staying power of books filled with visual narratives of a family’s history appear never to have been stronger, despite soaring divorce rates (17.7 per 1,000 married women, according to The State of our Unions 2005, National Marriage Project at New Jersey’s Rutgers University), and a changing definition of the family unit.
Sally Walden, a licensed marriage and family therapist with Spindletop MHMR in Beaumont, said the popularity of scrapbooks might play out against a backdrop of uncertainty in a troubled world.
“As a nation, we’ve dealt with a lot of tragedy and trauma in the past few years. When you preserve your family’s history, you provide a sense of continuity and security. That helps people feel grounded and to have a sense of something worthwhile to pass on to the next generation.”
Jill Davis, founder of http://scrapbook.com and a scrapbooker for more than 30 years, said in press materials women live in a world where their daily labor has to be repeated almost as quickly as it is performed; scrapbooks, however, remain for generations.
For people of faith, scrapbooking can be an expression of a family’s spirituality. “Faithbooking” is chronicling “the fingerprints of God,” with photographs and scripture.
For some scrapbookers, like Marni Kaner of Dallas, “preserving memories of the Jewish activities in her family’s life, such as holiday observances and life-cycle milestones, is a way to safeguard Jewish culture in the face of assimilation,” according to http://religionlink.org
In many ways, scrapbooking is the same as it was generations ago, said Allison Byrd, a 36-year-old Fannett substitute teacher and home-based business consultant with scrapbooking company Creative Memories. But it’s moved “to the next level.” While she could buy pages with themes and cutouts for the photos, Byrd prefers to put her own touch on her family’s pictorial life.
“I’ve seen where you design the page layout and if your pictures are digital, you move the pictures onto the page and print it out. That doesn’t appeal to me,” she said. “I like the hands on approach. I feel like my children will appreciate something made by hand. They just mean more.”
Creativity takes many forms, Byrd said. Some people create what she calls “naked” albums, with nothing more on a page than a photo and identifying information on the subject. Others go to the extreme.
“Besides the paper and stickers, ink stamps, brads and other embellishments, they use feathers, ribbons, fabric and even wood, anything their creativity lets them stick on the page. Some people put more embellishments than they do pictures,” Byrd said.
For her, scrapbooking is more about the stories behind the pictures than the intricate ways in which they can be displayed in new-style scrapbooks.
“My dad’s parents died within a year of each other. We have a huge container of pictures and have no clue who (the people in them) are. I don’t want that to happen to my children. I want them to know their life, including the people.”
All that remains of the scrapbooks her grandmother made are a couple of pages that survived a house fire that destroyed Byrd’s parents’ home when she was 21.
While Bogue’s reasons for scrapbooking might be similar to her mother’s, the new photo-friendly materials and accessories allow her to preserve her family history in a more secure and lasting form.
Bogue, determined that her albums will far outlive her mother’s, has graduated from her earlier sticker-mania (”If one looks good, a dozen must be even better”) to more creative themes.
“Mother had four albums that were falling apart; plus, she had a satchel full of pictures. She started taking pictures in 1934 when she and my dad had been married a year or so. I have all kinds of pictures from places they lived. I remember some, but others, I have no idea who they are,” Bogue said.
Bogue’s scrapbooks - and there are a bunch (her blended family includes 7 children, 18 grandchildren, 11 great-grandchildren, one great-great-grandchild and another on the way) - include wedding books and a military scrapbook for her husband, Joseph Wayne Bogue. Quite an accomplishment considering she only had one photo with which to work originally.
“He was in the military for three years. Several years ago, he found out there was an airborne reunion. All I had was a picture of him as a sergeant and all of his papers. We started going to reunions and they started giving me pictures. I now have two albums full.”
Instead of leaving boxes and crumbling pictures like her mother, Bogue intends on leaving a detailed history.
“It’s the story of our family.”
As Bonny Millican, co-owner of Scrap N’ Memories in Beaumont said, “I can keep up with everything my sons, Taylor, 10 and Shelton, 7, do. I make a scrapbook for every year. I do double prints so each will have a book. If a picture was special enough to take at the time, it’s important enough for the future. Add journaling, and these albums tell the story behind the picture.”
jmcbride@hearstnp.com
(409) 838-2808
http://www.southeasttexaslive.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=17121899&BRD=2287&PAG=461&dept_id=512551&rfi=6