Why Write your Family History?

 

My Great Grandparents, Grandmother, Great Aunts

Have you written your Family History?

        by Camille Cole

My sister teaches second grade. Not long ago she asked her students to write a short piece about their family. To her surprise, most of them, most of these seven year-olds did not know much of anything about their families. Some did not even know who was their dad, much less who were their grandmother and grandfather, aunts, and uncles. One child, for example, lives with mother and step-father and isn’t clear who is their father. Mother is pregnant with her boyfriend. There are step-siblings, there are half-siblings. You get my drift.

Back in the day, our day, we had a mother and a father, aunts and uncles; we had two sets of grandparents. When we went to grandmother’s house, she told us about when she was a child, about the olden days. Letters were written and saved throughout generations. History was passed along through these stories and letters, letters that had been saved from previous generations. We can go on Ancestry dot com and find a simple history through census records, letters, and other records that have been recorded and saved.

Today, emails and texts are passed back and forth. That’s how we communicate.  I can tell you as a technologist, those communiques will be long gone, inaccessible within the next ten years. We hop from version to version of Windows and Mac OS, and by the time our grandchildren are searching for clues about their family history, that documentation will be nothing but the remnants of ether, an Internet of the past. Same goes for our digital photo albums.

Will family history mean less to future generations than it does today? Perhaps. Or, it will simply be harder to find. As a matter of fact, it won’t exist. There will be no letters, fewer family albums that make sense, fewer stories that have been written on paper and passed from generation to generation.

When I was writing my family history, The Brass Bell, I ran into difficulties when going through photo albums, organized carefully by my grandmother and great aunts. All those heart wrenching pictures of young children and young adults were left for my generation to decode with little or no documentation. They left the pictures, but forgot to label them with names, places, and dates. How frustrating! But they exist.

So 50 years from now, what will our descendants have available to tell them the story of those who came before? All the pictures and all the stories and all the correspondence will have been digital and long gone into a bucket of cyberspace that is no longer relevant.

What can be done?  Write your family story! Whatever you know—however you want to tell what you know, be it an essay that covers what your grandmother has told you, or your mother, or an uncle. Perhaps you can write a memoir or a narrative non-fiction book about an interesting person or story you know about your family or a person in your family.

Two years ago I wrote an account of my family—the story of my Great Aunt Marion who started a school house in a chicken coop in my great grandfather’s cherry orchard. The name of my book is The Brass Bell. If you would like to see how I took one woman and her story and left a trace of my family history, you can access my book on Amazon, or through my publisher, Sahalie Publishing.

Sure, I’m trying to promote my book. I put a lot of work into it.  But I also want to encourage anyone who understands what I’m saying to write what you know down. It doesn’t have to be published. There are a lot of options, but write what you know, what has meaning to you and relevance for future generations. It might be as simple as a story about an uncle who ran a dairy farm. Fifty or one-hundred years from now, they won’t know what that meant. The most important thing to understand is that if we don’t write something down and print it out and save it, our family’s story is forever lost. Our society and our culture as we know it today and as we have been told about the past, will be gone like dead leaves on a maple tree in October. They are beautiful fill us with emotion and then they are gone.

If you purchase The BrassBell from the Sahalie website, mention this article and you will get free shipping plus a 10% discount on the book. This book is one example of how it can be done.  You can also write a memoir, a short essay of one thing about you or your family that has meaning to you, or a collection of essays. I kept a blog while I was researching and writing the book, and I found this helpful in all kinds of ways....people came forward with information; later they purchased the book.  

 Print out your documents and file them away. The paper will last longer than your digital documents.