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The Archives Bulletin Board

This service is intended for Wheaton College students, faculty and staff; people who live in convenient driving range to campus; or people who will be visiting Wheaton's campus. Every month, this Bulletin Board will highlight a new document or set of documents that are available in the Archives. Come on over and have a look! To view items previously featured on the Bulletin Board, click

August 2002:
Scrapbooks: Familiar But Unpredictable

Page from Marguerite Owen's photo album, featuring fellow Moody Bible Institute students soon to depart for China, a local Gospel team, and her husband Harry with John Stam.

from Photo Album File: Marguerite Owen I




Page from Stanley Kline's photo album, highlighting fellow missionary Margaret Clapper who worked among the pygmies of the Belgian Congo. Kline, apparently in retirement, kept a visual record of what appears to be all or most of the AIM staff from all the mission's various sending fields, at least the 1930s into the 1990s.

from Photo Album File: Stanley Kline V


Page from Helen Anderson's scrapbook, featuring shots at a local religious site in Yangchow, where Anderson lived with other CIM women for language training, a depiction of Chowkiakow, the city in Henan Province where she was first stationed to teach in a Bible school for women, a sketch of her Chinese language teacher, and Anderson herself in the lower right.

from Photo Album File: Helen Anderson I

You never know what you'll find when you open a scrapbook. Is it a photo album with photographs? Is it the story of a trip expressed in souvenirs? Maybe it's memories of a friend in the form of letters, cards and pictures? Maybe it's a childhood captured in drawings and first writing. We're familiar with these volumes, sometimes on deteriorating paper, sometimes with pages or items falling out of them, sometimes unfinished. Descriptions accompany the items or sometimes the images speak for themselves. These volumes may seem familiar, but they are hardly predictable, taking items and stringing them together to tell a particular story in a particular way. Scrapbooks and photo albums are one of the many forms of documents which make up the story of missions and evangelism at the Archives. The Owen and Anderson volumes appear to have been used to show to others, compressing years of work and contacts and sights between two covers, whereas the Kline notebooks are a reference resource.

The three scrapbooks featured above from Helen Anderson and Marguerite Owen (missionaries to China) and Stanley Kline (missionary in Africa) have proved to be an ongoing resource to the staff and Archives researchers. The papers of these three missionaries tell more of their stories. See:

Also see the Papers of Victor Plymire (Collection 341) or samples from his photo album.

To view items previously featured on the Bulletin Board, click .


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Last Revised: 08/01/02
Expiration: indefinite

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