Lisa Bearnson, editor of Creating Keepsakes Scrapbook Magazine, lives and breathes family history, and she has tried to interest her children in the subject since they were old enough to understand what she was talking about. She says she didn't realize how well she was succeeding until last Memorial Day.
That's when Bearnson and her husband traditionally take their children on a tour of the cemeteries near their Bluffdale, Utah, home. The children place flowers on the graves of family members, then listen as their parents tell stories about the relatives buried nearby.
"Usually we're not in a hurry," Bearnson said. "But last Memorial Day we were going up to a cabin, so we told the kids to run over and place the flowers so we could go. When he realized the visit was going to be short, Collin, who was 6, got all teary-eyed and asked, 'Aren't we going to tell any stories?'"
The family was late to the cabin because, Bearnson said, "we decided this was a tradition that was important to honor."
The Memorial Day visits are only a minor tactic in Bearnson's campaign to interest her children in family lore. Bearnson's house has a room filled with supplies and ready to accommodate any spontaneous scrapbook-making efforts. Her children are ages 4 months, 4, 7 and 10. Only the baby has yet to make her first scrapbook page.
"It's important for children to understand their family history because it connects the generations and tells them where they belong in the whole scheme of their family," Bearnson said.
"It does great things for their self-esteem to create a scrapbook page about themselves and their family. It's a creative outlet that gets them to turn off the TV and the Nintendo."
Some call scrapbooking the quilting bee of today because it brings people together to assemble embellished "memory books" filled with photos, mementos and lengthy handwritten captions.
Modern scrapbooking makes use of acid-free paper and other products that protect photographs. It's become a $500 million-a-year industry since the founding in 1987 of Creative Memories, a St. Cloud, Minn.-based direct-sales company that offers albums, supplies and workshops, called "crops," where participants learn to crop (trim) photographs, among other things.
Bearnson founded Creating Keepsakes four years later, shortly after the first scrapbook magazine hit the streets--Westminster-based Memory Makers, which emerged from editorial director Michele Gerbrandt's basement in May 1996.
"We weren't first by much, but we were first," said Memory Makers associate editor Lydia Rueger. Rueger says that in the five years since its first edition, Memory Makers' paid subscription base has grown from 5,000 to 210,000.
Both magazines offer regular "kids' corner" features. Perhaps because cutting and pasting are grade-school activities, children have been some of scrapbook-making 's earliest and most avid practitioners.
Kayla Tickton, 14, an eighth-grader at Hill Middle School, her sister, Joni Tickton , 17, a junior at George Washington High School, and their mother, Carolyn Dacres , have been putting their scrapbook pages together under the tutelage of Creative Memories consultant Dona Mandell for two years. Joni Tickton says crops "are a really fun thing to do when you're bored."
When she and her mom are cropping, they often "find old pictures, and my mom tells me stories about where that was and when it happened," she says. "I've found out a lot about my relatives. It's a little piece of my history. I learn more about myself ."
Dacres says crops are "more than just fun."
"When we start putting the pictures together, we talk about what the pictures were about. We talk about family memories and reminisce about the fun times."
Mandell says children are among her most enthusiastic clients: "Once they take a beginner class, they get all excited. The first thing they focus on is what's new in decorations. Kids love to use the stickers. But soon they begin to realize that they aren't just doing a craft. They're also documenting their memories."
If you don't yet have "archivally safe" supplies, start your project by keeping notes in a notebook or on the computer, say Mandell and Bearnson, who are both urgent in their warnings not to write on the backs of photographs with regular pens or pencils or use paper in scrapbooks that could cause photos to deteriorate.
"This is a great family activity," Bearnson said. "It's addictive. Once we start, my kids always want to keep going until they can say, 'Look what I made.' "
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