Heritage Albums: Drawing Family Boundaries

Every other Wednesday, I write a post from my dissertation.

In the case of heritage albums, the scrapbooker is explicitly doing family, making decisions about who is family and who is not by who gets included and who gets excluded in this particular scrapbooking style. The role of family is very important in most scrapbooks because:

It helps you connect with people in your family; to connect with ancestors maybe you never met, to get to know them a little better and understand your family history; and, maybe if you had a grandparent who did things a certain way and you never knew that, but you do things that same way. It helps you relate to them [other family members].

Respondents discuss how they learn about deceased and living family members and come to know them better through scrapbooking. Though heritage albums may show most explicitly how scrapbookers are doing family, all scrapbooks serve as a device that communicates who belongs in the family and who does not.

Burgess, Enzle, and Morry (2000:628) observe that even strangers who are photographed together “expressed greater social identity and greater mutual affinity than did” strangers who are not photographed together. Simply placing people within the same photographic frame creates a bond between them. Scrapbooks can do the same thing. A family bond can be created by placing people within the same heritage album. These people may have never met in real life but by choosing to add a person to a heritage album, the scrapbooker is choosing to record a family relationship. Scrapbooking might not strengthen family bonds, but it certainly helps strengthen the boundaries between family and nonfamily.

How do you decide who is included in a heritage scrapbook? Join the conversation below.

Reference:

Burgess, Mark, Michael L. Enzle, and Marian Morry. 2000. “The Social Psychological Power of Photography: Can the Image-Freezing Machine Make Something of Nothing?” European Journal of Social Psychology 30(5):613-30.

Related Posts:

• Doing Family via Family Scrapbooks
• Scrapbooks are a Means of Communication

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Stephanie