History

Whom is GREAT? What a question, along with whom is good, perfect, adorable and worthy of emulation. I can ask the flip side too, but I wish to see the sunshine side of life.

I have been noticing a trend, in scrapbooking, and in headlines. We try to reduce everything to short singular and maybe trite phrases. No one but me it seems does more than a single page on a subject or topic. From newspapers to magazines; it HAS to fit on the single page! No continuations, no complete stories, not even a full answering, in complete sentences of the basic journalist’s questions of “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” “why,” and finally “how.”

I understand the difference between the scrapbook layout created for one’s own family and one created with the intent of being published. But even among those pages we do for ourselves, we try to reduce down to a single page or two. Not all events or persons in real life can be so handled.

Some do a separate album or book, to cover a topic or person in depth. But to me, a chronological scrapper, it takes it out of the context of daily life. It becomes (to me at least) disjointed and disconnected from true reality. A reality that is reflected in the pages of the family chronicles I create.

Earth shattering, momentous events have occurred in a short time, and I try to capture the world “before,” “during,” and “after.” An entire era has been passing away, a world view that is as disconnected from today’s reality as that of my own Great-grandparents worldview and values were from my own. This is happening in less than one generation.

What hard reality now will be inconceivable to our grandchildren?

Okay, let’s go back to the small scale then, what events in the “real world” have had a direct and maybe daily impact upon your own life, and that of your family?

Do you document it? Do you scrap it? Is it even a topic of discussion in the house with your family?

No longer is “history” the purview of a small number of so-called “experts.” We each are “historians” and “journalists” for our families.