Documenting Sometimes Challenging Family Relationships in Scrapbooks

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

Doing family via scrapbooks is not just documenting that a familial relationship exists, but capturing the essence of that relationship in the scrapbook. Sometimes the relationship is not just about the people in the photo. For example, one of my study’s respondents mentioned how she likes to take photos of her son and his father together because she misses her own parents and wants to memorialize the parent-child relationship for her son. What she is doing, is an example of how scrapbookers work to provide children with positive memories of their family as a unit in scrapbooks.

Of course, it is obvious that scrapbookers focus on preserving positive family memories, but what about more challenging family memories?

What a happy coincidence that this topic comes up right after the recent Paperclipping Roundtable episode, Before You Entered the Picture. The episode was excellent and the listener comments have been very insightful about how you might document more challenging family relationships. When you finish reading this post, definitely go listen to that episode for another perspective.

For scrapbookers in families that do not neatly conform to the idealized family type (e.g., mom, dad, 2.4 kids, dog, cat, picket fence, you get the idea…), recording their family story can be more challenging. These scrapbookers appear to make a more conscious effort in shaping their family’s story in scrapbooks. They may have to navigate difficult relationships and may be absent from some of the stories they wish to scrapbook. A respondent in a polyamorous family is very conscious about who gets scrapbooked. She focuses on including things that happen to the whole family rather than what happens to individuals in her family scrapbook and keeps things that happen to individuals in separate albums.

Though most respondents do not go to such extremes, others respondents also talk about struggles they have regarding the inclusion of various family and ex-family members. For example, one respondent is estranged from her family of origin but does have a few scrapbook pages about her estranged family members even though they were difficult for her to create. Another respondent is divorced but has a child with her ex-partner. They all celebrate this child’s birthday together so inevitably, the ex is photographed and included in the scrapbook. This respondent emphasizes that the scrapbooks are about her child’s family, which is not necessarily the same as her family. Moreover, this scrapbook is for her, not her ex, so if her ex wants a scrapbook about their child she has to make it herself.

Scrapbooking may be difficult at times when it involves deciding how to include family and ex-family, but oftentimes scrapbook layouts read like love letters to various family members. For example, one respondent makes pages about her feelings towards each of her brothers with each brother garnering separate pages in the scrapbook. What is interesting, though, is that these pages remain in the scrapbook and are not given to the family member. It is difficult to know if the brothers even realize these tribute pages exist. Regardless, this reemphasizes that scrapbooking is primarily for the scrapbooker rather than for others even if the subject is about others.

How to do you preserve challenging family relationships in your scrapbooks? Join the conversation below.

Did you know that you can subscribe by RSS?

Stephanie