Kith

INTRODUCTION TO THE SCRAPBOOKS AND THEIR USE

At some time early in our marriage, we started putting together a scrapbook, containing photographs and other objects (mostly paper of course) which could be attached to a page. We chose 12" x 14" sized sheets. For the first volume we created a set of wooden covers but switched to commercial ones for the other three. Altogether, the four volumes cover roughly the period from 1947 to to 1957, when life probably got more complicated...

The actual scrapbooks themselves are starting to show the effect of age, and when we became aware of this and when we thought it might be very interesting for our grandchildren's grandchildren -- let alone all those of earlier generations -- to be able to browse through them at their leisure, we decided to attempt to reproduce them in digital form. The results of that decision are given here. We recognize that these versions lack the fun of seeing and handling the real thing, but this is as close as possible for the many people and generations yet to come who might like a peek at the early years of our marriage.

The links in the tables below will take you to a web-page showing a table containing comments about that page and a fingernail photo of the scrapbook page itself (just click on the the fingernail itself to see the full photo in you browser; also using the full screen view option in your browser will help reading the fine print). If there are details on that page, such as the contents of greeting cards, additional tables are shown to allow you to see them separately.

Note the left and right-pointing arrows at the top of each scrapbook page: clicking on one of these will take you directly to the preceding or following page in the scrapbook -- in effect, they turn the pages of the scrapbook for you.

Also, you can return to the Scrapbook Page itself by clicking on the "#1" (or 2 or 3) in the heading of the current page.

The scrapbook pages and the various details on a page were photographed using a digital camera. The resulting images were then modified using the Microsoft PhotoDraw program; the modifications included sharpening and altering the color -- e.g., all of the black-and-white photos were changed from color to gray-scale. This process resulted in a reasonably -- but not perfect -- representation of the scrapbook contents, but one which should last for generations, whereas the books themselves will almost certainly not.