The pages fascinate. Old, torn and worn, they are filled with memories.
Here a ticket to a show, stained and worn. There a business card from a long-forgotten merchant. And everywhere photos: men and women standing straight and mirthless, staring into the lens as if smiling for the camera was a late 20th century cultural phenomenon; buildings and homes, some identified in fading white ink on black paper, many sliding loosely among the pages, long ago torn from any identifying placement.
And the guns. Why photos of guns? Why photos of men with guns?
The scrapbook (click the photo below) put together by Maude Neville, daughter of A.W. “Judge” Neville, in the 1920s became part of the A.M. and Welma Aikin Jr. Regional Archives several years ago. As Archivist Daisy Harvill and I paged through it recently, the irony wasn’t lost.
There before us lay an early 20th century technology for recording events, for taking bits of history and making their memories as permanent as possible. And there we stood discussing how we might one day transfer those memories to an early 21st century technology serving the same purpose: the Internet.
Which is better? I’m not sure either could be called better. The Internet will take these pieces of the past and make them available for all to view and read. But scrapbooks pasted together with glue and tape and bound with happy memories won’t go away soon. Nor should they. They carry intimacy and emotion no Web site can match.
