How Does a Scrapbook Begin?

Each Wednesday, I usually write a post from my dissertation.

When scrapbookers have completed a beginning of an album they do things such as use a photograph of their child on the first day of school to begin an album about a child’s educational career. One respondent created an album about her husband’s family as a gift for them and it in announced her own pregnancy. She begins the album with a photograph of her mother-in-law and father-in-law and ended the album with the sonogram photo of the child she and her husband were expecting.

Beginning pages may be very specific or somewhat general. For example, one album begins with an introductory page titled, “growing a crop of memories” and includes the year the photos in the album were taken. A couple of respondents take great care in creating title pages that are like a table of contents. One respondent includes a copy of a photograph from each page of the scrapbook, for instance.

Most scrapbooks do not have title pages or concluding pages ending the album because most scrapbooks shown to me are in various stages of completion. In a couple of cases, memorabilia is literally shoved into the page protector for pages to be completed in the future. Some pages are not even in page protectors yet, not even suggesting a beginning or an ending.

How do you begin a scrapbook? Does it depend on the subject? Under what circumstances are you able to successful create a beginning to a scrapbook? Does it even matter?