I dug into the past last week.
But first, let me take you back to what started it all. Before I had children, I decided I was going to make a scrapbook with pictures from my childhood.
I gathered all the photos from the few albums I had, and the photos my mom had in her possession. Then, I scanned them.
It was maybe a few hundred, not even close to what I can capture in one week. It was a different time. You took the photos and then took the rolls to get them developed. Also, my mom admits she didn’t take a lot of photos. My paternal grandmother was the shutterbug, not her.
I have slowly scrapbooked pages, as in I just finished my 3-year-old photos, and it’s only because I stopped working on my 3-year-old’s first-year album. Now I am working on my pre-Kindergarten days.
Again, not many photos but there are four pictures from an event I vaguely remember since I was between 4 and 6 years old. My mom wrote a brief description on the back. I was just going to scrapbook it, but my need to have more detail for the page was strong.
I did what any person would do in this day and age – I went on Facebook. I happened to have my preschool teacher on my friend’s list. I opened the messenger, attached the photos and asked her if, after so many years, she knew what the event was. Her first response was it must have been a special event because everyone is wearing name tags and parents were there. Then, came a longer response – a spark to get my research going in the right direction.
“While you were in my classroom, I planned a special event for preschoolers. The Oxford Leader took photos and published an article about the day,” she wrote.

Yessssss! I knew what school years I was in her class and I knew when I would be at the Sherman Publications main office last Tuesday. I took my break after we were done with production and thumbed through the archives. I found two articles about a day of learning from different years. Ah, community journalism at its finest.
Now a new school year has started, let us fill your scrapbooks. Let us know what is going on in your schools.