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| 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.
