Biographies And Scrapbooking : Our Attempts To Capture The Past

At first glance you may think of biographies and scrapbooking as 2 very different things but as a fan of both I know what drives my passion for both. Biographies are the accounts of someone's life, though usually they are in written form in biography books they can be spoken word versions like those on audio books. Some can even be made into film. How many Elvis Presley movies have you seen? They are usually authorized by the subject of the book and is for the most part backed up by some form of documentation. The unauthorized ones don't necessarily have back up and may at times appear to be works of fiction.

Scrapbooking is the gathering of pictures, news stories and written accounts of significant occasions in one's life. When people think of scrap books they may think of their children since many mothers are given scrapbooking albums to use for documenting their child's first year of life. Those memories are often the most special and usually the most fleeting.

So as you can see biographies and scrapbooking have to do with preserving our memories. If you look at the best seller lists in the biographies sections of bookstores you will often find movie stars like Jimmy Stewart or Natalie Wood. If you are film buff like I am you can appreciate how an actor or actress can define an era. By reading about them you get closer to reliving that time. Other biographies center around great historical figures like Abraham Lincoln or Albert Einstein. We love to see how people with seemingly ordinary beginnings like you and I can go on to achieve great things.

Though scrapbooking is not typically thought of as the traditional biography imagine what it would be like to have a scrapbook totally dedicated to all the important events in the life of George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. Some of you may debate that this has already been done by the interweaving of photographs in biographical books.

With the advances in technology today scrapbooking your family history is becoming a full media event. Online scrapbooking services exist that allow you to add photos, videos and audios to timelines of events in your family's life. The true fan of biographies will also be able to benefit from these advances where the producer of a biography will be able to interweave video, documents, interviews and other audio to bring to life a richer representation of what biographies are all about.

So as you can see biographies and scrapbooking have a lot in common and will benefit from the advances in production of both. Biographies in audio book format are my current preference but I can see a future full of biographies that do more than just tell a person's life story. They will make you feel like you lived it!