Crafted Connections
The Album of Lizzie Leaman Groff, Preserving Memory, Community, and Social Bonds Through Scrapbooking
Scrapbook Album of Lizzie Leaman Groff Weaver, Roughwood Collection, Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center, Kutztown University.
Scrapbooking is a way to catalog memories, experiences, culture and social landscape. It functions as both a visual journal of an area during a certain time, and as a way of expressing oneself. Lizzie Leaman Groff collected many die-cut prints and compiled them within this album, starting in 1882. These prints ranged from just fragments, to advertisements and calling cards.
She received most of these fragments from family, friends, and community members. She made note of who gave her which prints, displaying her appreciation for her community and family. Gifts hold sentimental associations with a person and their memories. The calling cards would foster community connections and maintain relationships. Collecting them and arranging them showed the closeness of her to her community. Trade and business cards demonstrate how businesses interact with the communities they serve, and underscore the value businesses play in defining social landscape and community involvement.
Lizzie’s scrapbooking was a way of deeply connecting with her community and showing how important her community was to her. They acted as a material way of depositing and saving memories, preserving the physical proof of a person’s life to look back on. As people, we tend to define ourselves based on our relationship with the world around us. Our relationship with other people, with objects, with nature, with activities, with everything. Her scrapbook is a collection of her relationships with her community that helped define part of who she was.
This online exhibition was produced by Oakley Handy (’28).