Hello and welcome! I’m here to share another Inspired by with you today!

Riikka and I challenge each other each month to create something with a particular theme or thing in mind. This theme or thing can be anything and for this Inspired by Riikka suggested the television series Shooting the Past.

Shooting the Past was first shown in 1999. I know Riikka owns a DVD of the series, which I believe is still sold online. I on the other hand found (and watched) the entire series on YouTube.

I highly recommend you watch it. The story is amazing, the actors are brilliant and I think it addresses a couple of important reminders for memory keepers and story tellers.

I must warn that this series is 15 years old… It is sloooooow. I’ve read that the reviews back then already addressed the slow pace, so rest assure that it will seem even slower now.

I also thought the photo montages looked rather poor, even for 1999… But that will make far more sense when you watch the series! Because all outdatedness aside: I still think you will enjoy watching it!

It took me some time to figure out what to do. I remember being highly inspired after watching the series for the first time, but it didn’t spur any specific ideas.

I watched the series again last week and this time I took notes. There are many things that jumped out at me the second time and I jotted them all down. Like the talk of photos of shop fronts of the fifties, which immediately made me think of this fifties video my mom found recently that features my grandparents (jump to 06:00!).

I wrote down random things like: ‘Library of Memories’, ‘photos on a clothesline’, ‘photo of my street’ and quotes like “All kinds of pictures with incredible stories attached” and ‘Ten million pictures, one story”. I also wrote down ‘Verborgen Verleden’, which is the Dutch version of Who Do You Think You Are.

I decided to rummage through my boxes of photos. I have tried to implement Stacy Julian’s ‘Library of Memories’ system in the past and although my digital photos are organized, my printed photos are not. Some of them are in binders, but the majority lives in (three) boxes…

I didn’t set out to find a heritage story to tell, but I happened to read a couple of letters from my dad earlier that week and I knew I had photos of him wearing lederhosen as a child. I found them, but as I was sorting through the photos, this pair jumped out at me:

Meet my great grandparents!

I remembered my dad telling me about his grandfather. I had a story I could scrapbook about him! I went through all my heritage photos to see what I had besides the tiny passport photo. And once I had a handful of photos, I decided that I could probably focus on one part of the story. The part about my grandmother being extremely proud of her father because he used to be a keen soccer player.

The funny thing was that once I decided to focus on the soccer story, I noticed that my dad is balancing a ball on his head in one of the group photos featuring his grandfather. Wow!!!

After watching the series for the second time, I had conducted an unsuccessful online search for a photo of the street where I currently live. The houses are from the 1930-ies and I was hoping to find an old one from our house in one of those regional online photo archives. No such luck, but whilst working on the soccer story, I remembered those photo archives and I googled the names of the soccer clubs my great grandfather supposedly played for…

And I found him!!! On two photos!!! And the photos were downloadable!!! For free… !!!

I debated whether or not I actually wanted to scrapbook the story. To be honest: it’s kind off daunting to pair heritage photos with (modern) scrapbook paper. It would have been enough for me to blog it… I know there are more stories to tell (the one about the lederhosen for instance) and I interestingly felt I wanted to collect the stories rather than to scrapbook them. Hmmm…

But I had to have something to show for this Inspired by, so in the end I scrapbooked anyway. I made some interesting choices along the way though. I decided a 12×12 layout wasn’t spacious enough, so I chose an A4 spread. I also felt I could not use any artsy techniques. This and the fact that I tried to keep things simple, makes me feel like I stepped back in scrapbook time when I look at the result… It looks old-school!

And lastly I decided not to add a title. This spread is just one part of the story about my great grandfather and if I decide to scrapbook the rest, I want to be able to make it into a chapter in an album. Decisions, decisions!

Fortunately I don’t have to decide anything right this minute… Because it’s time to visit Riikka’s blog to see what story she has to tell!

Thanks for stopping by!