by Debbie Hodge
spurring your memory for scrapbooking past times
Are you ready to scrapbook your younger years, but unable to remember specific details? Maybe you’re working on “all about me” pages or a “book of me” and just trying to get scrapbook page subject ideas by remembering incidents. The first few lessons in our Scrapbook Your Story series have lots of prompts for you to scrapbook where you come from and your younger years. But what if you can’t remember enough to get those pages scrapbooked?
Try a little look at the popular culture of your youth. Use the resources below to check out the music, books, consumer goods, and even television shows of the era you’re recalling.
Source: stock.xchng / mjw
general nostalgia websites
There are lots of “nostalgia” websites offering pictures and links to fads, consumer products, lifestyles, commercials, music, tv shows, movies, world events, toys, timelines, trivia and much more. Type “70s nostalgia” (insert your desired decade) into your search engine to find such sites. Here’s a sampling of these sites by decade.
- InfoPlease – timelines by year or by decade
- 40s – Lisa’s Nostalgia Cafe – war bonds for Christmas
- 50s – Lisa’s Nostalgia Cafe – color TV, car seat belts, first organ transplant
- 60s When We Were Kids – Berlin Wall, “Feminine Mystique,” Woodstock
- 70s In The 70s – Evel Knievel attempts to jump snake river canyon
- 80s Driko’s 80s Music & Nostalgia – Jordache Jeans and Wierd Al Yankovich
- 90s 90s 411 – Beanie Babies, Doc Martens, Ally McBeal
music
You can also zero in on specific subjects that were important to you, like music. Limit yourself to browsing one of these sites for just a few minutes and then free-write for 10 to 20 minutes and see what kind of forgotten memories you’re able to recall.
- WTIT tape radio: top 100 songs by decade beginning with the 60s
- 365 top-selling songs of the 20th century
- SongLyrics.com
- Album & CD covers
television
Check out the details on the television shows you watched with these sites.
CrazyAboutTV.com Find lists of television shows from the 40s through present day. Select decade from the column on the left, click on your chosen show, and you’ll see a list of the episodes.
TelevisionTunes.com Listen to television show theme songs to spur memories. (I checked out “All in the Family” and “Rhoda.”)
movies
Cant’ remember which movies you watched–or are you just looking for a little more detail? You can get a list of movies by decade at IMDB.com (scroll down and find the links in the right sidebar) and then follow the links for specific movies for more memory spurs.
consumer goods/advertisements
Source: AdClassix.com
A great source of information on consumer goods are print advertisements.
AdClassix.com has print ads for perfumes, cars, food, pharmacy, oil and gas, restaurants and more up through the very early 70s. I tracked down this ad for the car I learned to drive on: an AMC Hornet!
So where will you start? Tell me what detail you find that surprises you–that had perhaps been a bit buried in the recesses of your memory.
