Where and When Did Scrapbooking Originate?

Where and When Did Scrapbooking Originate?

I am often curious of how things really started one might never truly know because not all information is documented. When I was a teenager my mom got me hooked on scrapbooking when she offered to pay me to help her create scrapbooks for my brother's to display at his graduation party. Scrapbooking has been a hobby of mine for quite some time it can be a very relaxing and fun hobby. If you have a very large amount of pictures to document then the process can be overwhelming at first. A few weeks ago I was scrapbooking pictures and other mementos from my wedding day and the events that led up to it. Whenever I am dong work that does not require much thought my brain goes wild. Sometimes I feel like I belong on a Seinfeld episode because I come up with such strange and random questions. Shortly thereafter I began thinking about when the craft of scrapbooking actually began and where? I can't imagine that it started too long ago but rather than taking the time to research the topic then I forgot about it and began thinking about something else. Thus, in class when we are asked to discuss something that we are curious about the question popped back into my head.

While looking for blogs to follow through the delicious website I stumbled across a site called scrapbook.com which had a large amount of followers. Thus, I decided to survey the thousands of followers by posting questions about the origin of scrapbooking. There are many followers that range from those who are just starting out to those who occassionally scrapbook to those who work for scrapbooking companies and what I would consider to be an expert. I created a post on Monday that asked readers if they had any information on the origin of scrapbooking.






The first reader confirmed my thought that the idea of scrapbooking originated around the same time that paper was created. People would document their memories and mementos in journals. However, she was told by the company she works for that the actual archival quality of scrapbooking was developed in 1996 by Creative Memories. When I checked the website to see if her statement was true I found that she was not completely correct. As cited on their website according to their story the process was shared with a group of women in January of 1987 by a Rhonda Anderson in Montana. A few months later she connected with an album manufacturer and they combined their vision to create the company called Creative Memories.


By the following day I received many more comments by the following afternoon. Many of the comments were very similar. Two of the readers even posted links on information they found:

The History of Scrapbooking
Where and When Did Scrapbooking Start?

There are also to books written on the history of scrapbooking that another reader recommended. I have not read these books yet because of time constraints but I will be reading
these books in order to further research the topic.
















Thus, I found that through these responses and researching the validity of these statements. According to the website Scrapbooker's Paradise, they also could not find an exact origin of scrapbooking but they believe that it began around the 18th Century and the name of scrapbooking came from the word scrap which was any type of paper, such as greeting cards and other discarded paper (Taylor).


According to Answer.com and the article called Where and When Did Scrapbooking Start?, found that contrary to the claims of Maureen Taylor, scrapbooking began in the 17th Century and Mark Twain worked on his scrapbooks every Sunday (Where and when did scrapbooking start, 2009). Thus, we are left to believe that it began around this time but becausethere is no proof of who or when scrapbooking was created we are left with a time frame. However, according to this website and what many scrapbooking experts have heard, scrapbooking did not start up again until Creative Memories started up their company in January of 1987.

Since I found several indirect answers while conducting my inquiry project I will have to continue to contact more experts and research until I find more direct answers. My next step is to find copies of the two books listed above that are about the history of scrapbooking in order to find more information on a more specific time frame of when scrapbooking began and where it originated.