History Of Scrapbooking

Scrapbooking is a fun and popular hobby that has really taken off in the last five years or so, and although many people think it’s a new trend, in reality, scrapbooking can be traced back quite a ways! Preserving family events in the form of memorabilia, scrapbooks, albums, and everything else has been going on for a long time. It’s a tradition that goes all the way back to the invention of photographs and print, which makes for a very rich and interesting history. Long story short, scrapbooking can be best described as a visual way of telling an important story in your life.

Going back to before photographs were even in existence, in Ancient Greece there was a very special notebook called a hypomnemata. This notebook was use to preserve and take record of things they had heard and seen. When materials started to be printed, these notebooks became books where they preserved and archived printed things that they found and though were important enough to save. Sound familiar? So scrapbooking can actually be traced back to Ancient Greece!

If you dive in a take a close look at American history, you’ll also see plenty instances of the same type of material preservation. Speaking of that, some of our most famous and well known early scrapbookers have names like Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain and others. Photographs were invented and were then used in these scrapbooks to document whatever event even better. They even used titles and mounted the pictures with special corners in order to preserve and describe the moment in question. They also contained newspaper clippings, letters, and all sorts of other memorabilia.

Fast forwarding to modern era scrapbooking – it really didn’t get hot again until the 80’s in America. A lady by the name of Marline Christensen was a key person that helped revive the timeless art of scrapbooking, and thankfully so! Back in 1980, she put more than fifty scrapbooks on display at the World Conference on Records in Utah, and not long after opened up her own scrapbooking store. Obviously that set the trend, because you can usually find a scrapbooking store in pretty much every decent sized town or city. With the boom in e-commerce, online scrapbook stores have made it easy for everyone to get involved.

So in conclusion, scrapbooking history is a very interesting and rich one. It’s neat to see how far we’ve come with the exponential growth of technology helping us to better store and preserve our dearest moments with scrapbooking. If you’re intrigued by this, and thinking of starting your own scrapbook with your family, there is no better time than now to take advantage of all of the great free scrapbooking resources on the internet