‘You are the family historian’: Hampton library hosts monthly scrapbooking program

If you have a smartphone, you’re a photographer.

“More pictures are being taken now, millions and millions of pictures,” Marie Golio acknowledged. “But we don’t do anything with them, so they’re being lost.”

Sure, many of the images turn up on social media or online sharing platforms. But even more tend to languish in the obscurity of a device’s storage system, rarely if ever seen until the owner deletes them to make room for more.

Golio’s mission is to guide people in reaping the benefits of 21st-century technology through a hobby that’s been around almost as long as photographs, themselves.

As an independent adviser for Creative Memories, a scrapbooking company with an international presence, she frequently conducts workshops and other learning activities. Included are sessions from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. the third Monday of each month at Hampton Community Library, with the next one scheduled for Feb. 19, Presidents Day.

“I’ve been doing this for 30 years,” Golio said about her involvement with Creative Memories.

She was expecting her first child and, given her own family history, had a desire to document as much as she could.

“My mother died when I was very, very young, and there were very few pictures of me as a child. And so I didn’t want that for my children,” the Indiana Township resident explained. “I went to the other extreme, and I have many, many, many, many pictures and albums of my children.

“But I think it’s important. That’s the legacy I will leave them.”

Evelyn Rudolph of West Deer, who participated in the Hampton library’s January session, has a similar emphasis. During a scrapbooking event she attended in 2007, an instructor told her: “You are the family historian.”

“That’s what stuck with me,” Rudolph said. “It’s a great hobby. At this point, my kids are grown. I can enjoy my grandchildren, and I have time to do that.”

She mentioned one of her grandsons as being helpful in providing creative material.

“Nicholas will take the camera and turn it, and so he gets different angles of people,” she said. “You’re young, and you try things.”

Scrapbooking can entail anything from using colorful paper with ornate borders to coming up with something relatively simple. For the sake of posterity, a key element is the inclusion of relevant information.

“It tells a story. It’s more than just putting photos in a book, because you can journal along with it and write things down,” Hampton resident Lisa Lish said. “It’s the story of our lives, and I love that.”

Her scrapbooking story is similar to Golio’s, going back about three decades with the birth of the first of her four children.

“I’ve been doing it for a long time, but then I lost touch with whoever got me involved in it. So I found Marie,” Lish said, going as far as calling the Creative Memories headquarters in Minnesota to find a Pittsburgh-area adviser.

To date, she has nearly a dozen 12-by-12-inch scrapbooks on her shelf, and she’s worked on other family projects.

“I made a smaller scrapbook for each of my kids, from birth to high school, various snippets of each year of their lives,” she said. “And that was their gift at their high school graduation.”

For Ruth Volle of Shaler, it’s a matter of picking up where she left off.

“Years ago, I tried to start scrapbooking. But I had two kids, and there’s no time,” she said. “Now, I just recently retired, and I think I’m going to get back into it. And I have 20 years’ worth of pictures to put in a scrapbook.”

She compliments Golio for helping her back on track, and Marie welcomes her aboard.

“We’ve created just this wonderful community,” Golio said. “There are some people who still come to my workshops and retreats who were at my very first class, 30 years ago. They were at that very first class, and they’re still working on their albums, still not finished.

“But you’re never finished, as long as you’re taking pictures.”