The photos are already there. Grandad teaching someone to fish, the two of them on the bench outside the dairy, a small boy in enormous gumboots following a large man across a paddock. They sit in phones, backed up and unlooked-at. A grandparents scrapbook is the difference between having those photos and keeping them.
This post lays out five pages you can build from photos you already have, plus a way to get the words that make a grandparents scrapbook worth opening in twenty years. National Grandparents Day lands in early September in the US, which makes the next few weeks a natural deadline, but none of these pages needs an occasion.
Table of Contents
What makes a grandparents scrapbook different
Most scrapbook pages record an event. A grandparents scrapbook records a relationship, and relationships live in repeated, ordinary moments rather than milestones. The pages below are deliberately built around errands, habits and sayings instead of birthdays.
The other difference is time. This is the scrapbook most likely to be pulled out at a ninetieth birthday or read aloud at a funeral. Words matter more here than in any other album, which is why two of the five pages are mostly writing.
Five grandparents scrapbook pages worth making
1. The errand page
One photo of a completely unremarkable outing: the hardware shop, the bakery, the car wash. Caption it with the actual errand and the date. In a grandparents scrapbook the mundane pages become the treasures, because nobody else thought to keep them.
2. The silhouette page
Two figures, one large and one small, side by side. If you have a photo of the two of them from behind, use it; if not, silhouette clipart carries the same shape. Denim and kraft papers keep the page masculine and quiet, and the height difference does all the emotional work.
3. The “things he says” page
No photo at all. Collect five or six phrases everyone in the family can hear in his voice and set them in word art on a newsprint background. If titling pages is not your strength, our guide to scrapbook page titles covers how to make text carry a layout.
4. Then and now
Grandad at seven on the left, the grandson at seven on the right. Same age, sixty years apart. Old family photos work even when they are creased and underexposed; the imperfection is the texture of the page.
5. The letter page
Ask him to write, or record him talking and transcribe it. One page, his words, addressed to the grandchild by name. This is the page that turns a grandparents scrapbook from a nice object into a family document.
Getting the stories out of him
Most grandfathers will not volunteer stories but will answer questions. StoryCorps’ great questions list is the best starting set there is, and the Library of Congress has a practical guide to family oral history for going deeper.
Record the conversation on a phone while you look through old photos together. The photos are the prompt; the transcript becomes captions for half the grandparents scrapbook without anyone sitting down to write.
Building the pages digitally
Every page above can be made on a tablet or laptop by layering papers, silhouettes and word art, and a digital grandparents scrapbook has one advantage a physical one cannot match: it duplicates. Build it once, print a copy for grandad and export a PDF for every branch of the family.
If you have never assembled a digital page, start with our digital scrapbooking for beginners walkthrough; the first page takes an evening and the skills carry to everything else on this site.
Putting it together: a worked example
The pages in this post use the Little Shadows grandpa-and-grandson bundle: 58 coordinated pieces including denim, kraft, olive, weathered grunge and newsprint papers, grandad-and-grandson silhouettes and word-art sentiment stamps, all at 300 DPI.
The silhouettes and sentiments in the Little Shadows grandpa and grandson bundle are drawn for exactly the five pages above, and the muted palette means pages built months apart still sit together as one album.
Make the errand page first
It takes one photo and ten minutes, and it teaches the core lesson of a grandparents scrapbook: the ordinary stuff is the good stuff. The letter page can wait until you have momentum. The errand page can be done tonight.
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