How many of you are recording your family history?
In this electronic age, it’s easy to fall into that “I don’t need to save this stuff…I can always look it up on the internet” mentality. And for state and national historical events, that’s true. However I still save newspapers and things about current events.
I started that when JFK was assassinated. Coincidentally, I was in high school in Ft. Worth at the time, and many of my friends had just returned from Love Field where they saw Kennedy arrive that morning. I honestly think this was the first event outside my own personal world that affected me.
(I do remember when I was younger, my Dad, who was in the Air Force, brought a television to school so my class could watch the first space launch. But I was brought up with all that flying and space stuff, and while I thought it was neat, had no sense of the historical value it had.)
But, back to my original thought.
What about personal, real life events? A few years ago my parents went on a journey of discovery and obtained old newspaper clippings, birth/death/marriage certificates, and made copies of various courthouse documents about their families.
Later Dad told us about my great-something grandfather – a Texas doctor in 
the period of the Civil War. He described, in storytelling style, the roving tent cities, what made up hospitals in those days and things the people went through. He also showed us a certificate recording the deaths of two great-something uncles who were killed in a bar fight. They were innocent bystanders who were struck by stray bullets, according to the document.
At other family gatherings, we heard of their lives as farm raised kids. My mother told us of ‘loving’ ducklings to death when she was three or four. She hugged one until it stopped wiggling, set it down and picked up another, and so on…apparently, she nearly wiped out a whole family of ducks before anybody noticed! We got to know our parents as teenagers and as newlyweds, and lived some of my Dad’s early military adventures.
Then, of course, my brothers and I have memories of our own, growing up as military brats.
I have never been one to write memoirs, except for the incidents I relate in this blog. But the more I think about it, the more I think I need to. These are stories that my great-great-grandchildren will never know if somebody doesn’t pass them on. They make us human. They give us a connection to those ancestors we only know from photographs in a shoebox.
Listen to the things your parents and grandparents are telling you. This is real life, in eras and circumstances that will never exist again. Worth passing on, don’t you think?
Don’t know how to start? Marilyn Collins, CHS Publishing, has several books on discovering your personal history and writing memoirs. Check out her site….
Even though they told us stories about growing up, I wish my parents had written more down. With the help of a story-telling cousin, I’ve learned more about my mother’s family than my dad’s. Every generation, at some point, wishes the previous one had recorded their history better. I’m thinking of doing that for mine.
Good post, Gayle. The digital age is good and will be even better when it stops growing and changing. I have family history done only 10 years ago and completely in accessible. It’s on floppy discs (my computer has no floppy drive) in a word processing format I probably couldn’t open anyway. Thank goodness for hard copies.