Treasure Chest Thursday - Gram's Scrapbook

My paternal grandmother, Mamie Olive (Martindale) Spurlock, kept a scrapbook in which she glued all manner of things: newspaper announcements of births and marriages, obituaries, telegrams, church programs, war ration books, membership cards, and of course, photos. When she died in 1971, my sister Jane was given the scrapbook; when Jane died in 2004, it was passed on to her youngest daughter, Cheryl. Right now I have the scrapbook and I'm in the process of scanning everything in it. You can see from this picture that it's in pretty bad shape, and I want to capture all the images before it falls apart completely.

My grandmother glued and pinned items to sheets
of two-hole punched, lined notebook paper and kept them in a binder.

I didn't know Gram very well. She lived in Houston and we lived in California. I remember going to visit once but I was more interested in playing with my cousins than in getting to know my grandmother. I regret that now as I try to piece together who she was by looking at the things she treasured enough to save. Over the coming weeks, I'll share my journey of getting to know my grandmother through her scrapbook.


© 2012 Denise Spurlock