Archiving Family History

Recently I did a little archiving of family history. I’m a bit of a pack rat. I don’t deny this. I’m a collector, a keeper, a saver, and I’m destined to be one of those people who will grow old and when I die you will enter my house and find mazes consisting of old newspapers and dusty boxes. But probably no cats. To make up for my packratishness, I’ve developed ways to organize my collections to keep things in order and condensed.

I have told you about how I organize all of our mementos (tickets to shows, wedding invites, etc), but I also have stacks and stacks of newspapers in the basement. Every time I see a story in the paper I want to save (usually because it is about an event I attended, or spotlights a family member or friend) I would put the newspaper in a stack in the basement instead of just clipping the story. These stacks are not high enough to create mazes yet, but there’s enough of them to make my inner-organizer a bit twitchy. So I decided to do something about this chaos.

Before I begin, let me give you a little bit of background. I come by this tendency to collect newspaper articles naturally…it’s in my genes. You see my Nana used to sit on this couch seen to the right and go through the papers each and every day and clip any article that she thought someone in her family (or one of her friends) would be interested in.

If there was ever an article about parenting or early childhood education that article would be clipped and my name would go on the top of it. She clipped stories about my siblings & cousins when they made the paper for sports activities. She clipped every single story about GE and gave it to Michael. Sometimes she would clip recipes for me, or stories about fun places to take the kids in our area. I often wondered what her paper must have looked like after she was finished clipping for the day. It must have looked rather like paper swiss cheese.

Once she clipped these stories and added names to them she would put them in a beautiful china bowl that sat on a table by her front door. And every time someone would visit her house they would know to look in the bowl for clippings and other miscellaneous items she had left there for them.

I think it’s only fitting that when I took a weekend to sort through all of my newspapers that this picture of my Nana slipped out from between the papers:

I decided the best way to preserve these articles that I wanted to save was in a scrapbook format, so I cut each article out, taking care to clip the date when I could, and the title of the paper it was in, and then I used a scrapbooking adhesive to safely adhere the articles to papers that I put into the album. I know, I know, I could have just kept them all in a manilla folder, but I’m addicted to scrapbooking, so they are in an album.

We were going away to the cabin for the weekend, and I wanted to do something productive (cleaning out clutter from my basement) but fun (again, I love scrapping). So I thought this would be a perfectly relaxing activity for me while we were away, and I was right…it was nice to be on vacation yet cross a project off my list.

And I found so many treasures while digging through these papers. Here’s a few snippets…

My father in law atop a bridge…