Many of us procrastinate
about gathering our family's stories and
history until it is too late. This article
outlines five EASY ways to get started. Using
the "How Do You Eat An Elephant? - One Bite
At A Time" strategy, you will be started on
your family history before you know it!
I will never
forget the afternoon my Great Aunt Mildred
read my Great, Great Grandfather’s
autobiography to us out loud. The story was
only two pages long, and written in
long-hand, front and back. It seemed so brief
to capture an entire life but it was 100%
more than I had from any of my other great,
great, grandparents!
One of the stories J.C. Atkinson told was of
helping his brother’s family move by covered
wagon from Wisconsin to the Nebraska
Territory. He drove the extra wagon, helped
them build a sod house, and then turned
around and walked home. WALKED HOME! By
himself across the unbroken prairie! He
angled his way across the Nebraska and Kansas
until he got to the Missouri River. He worked
his way downstream on a river boat and then
got hired to work on another boat going back
up the Mississippi. He said he got back home
to Wisconsin “with 50 cents in my pocket and
a terrible fit of ague.” I have so often
wished I could ask him what he saw as a young
man on that walking and working tour across
the United States in the mid 1800s!
I also wonder why my other great great
grandparents didn’t leave us even a single
line of text about their lives but it is
probably the same reason so many of us don’t
think to leave a legacy for our families and
future generations.
• We’re busy living our lives.
• We may think that only the stories of
famous people are worth saving.
• We don’t know where to start.
Let me share with you five good starting
points. All of them can be done using the
“How do you eat an elephant? – One bite at a
time” strategy; meaning you can do a little
at a time and still get a lot done. By the
time you’ve worked on just one section, you
will probably be bitten by the family history
bug (I was!) and cruise right into writing a
personal history for your family. Here are
five things to do first.
1. Organize Your
Photographs
Many people have pictures, including
ancestral pictures all over the house. Albums
here. Shoeboxes and cigar boxes there.
• Step number one is to get all your
photographs in one place.
• Step number two is to go through the
pictures, a batch at a time, and write on the
back of each who is in the picture, when the
picture was taken, and what is happening in
the picture. You may not know all these
things, capture as many as you can.
• Here is another, perhaps easier, method. My
mother had a half dozen albums from her
childhood. I numbered all the pictures and
then sat beside her with my digital recorder
as she talked about each picture. I learned
so much! And I captured many family stories,
prompted by my mother’s seeing the pictures,
in both in my mother’s voice and in
transcription. There is a CD and
transcription in the front of every album
now. This project was easy and fun!
• The last thing you might want to do is scan
all family pictures into the computer and
share them with the rest of the family. Too
often in the past, pictures were divided up
between members of a family resulting in no
one having a complete photographic record.
Degenerating pictures can often be saved and
restored using something like Photoshop. Once
your pictures are digitized and shared, you
can start agitating for the rest of the
family to send you copies of the photographs
they have.
2. Heirlooms, Memorabilia and
Treasures
The problem with Great Aunt Net’s footstool,
Grandma Groeger’s treadle sewing machine, and
my father’s antique scientific scales is that
they are never going to fold up flat so they
can be included in a personal history book.
3D heirlooms need to be documented.
Documenting the treasures in your family is
another activity that can be done one item at
a time. I purchased a copy of “Our Family
Heirlooms and Their Stores” by Patsy Kuentz
to help document heirlooms in my family but
you can also create your own way of
documenting.
One easy way to start is to just walk around
the house with a little notebook and write
about each heirloom: who owned it, how old is
it, where is it currently stored, and any
stories there may be behind it. Take a
digital picture of each item and attach it to
the page. Include on your list all the
information of historic and monetary value
but also remember to include things that no
one but members of your family would include
as treasures: the pillow cases Grandma
Atkinson hand-embroidered, the crock used to
make pickles during the Great Depression, the
Christmas tree ornaments made by the kids in
the family in the 1950s, the myrtle wood bowl
purchased on the family trip to Colorado in
1925.
When you get ready to write your personal
history you can include pictures of these
heirlooms, memorabilia and treasures as
“sidebars” or “text boxes” for example
weaving in the picture of Great Aunt Net’s
footstool when she shows up in the story.
3. Written Material
Look around and see what paper records you
have in your family. You may have your Great,
Great Grandmother’s naturalization papers
framed on the wall or a diary she kept as
crossed the ocean from Europe to America. My
father has a record of every purchase he made
from the time he was first married in 1948 to
today. (Okay, my Dad is a little bit
obsessive compulsive, but in a nice way!) At
first glance one might think “Who cares that
we bought an Easter dress for my little
sister in 1957, at Hertzfelds, and it cost
$12.35?” but these small details begin to
paint a picture of family life and the times
they lived in.
Start by looking for newspaper announcements
on births, weddings, anniversaries, special
events, and deaths. Check the family bible
for memorial or Holy cards. Also ask the
older members of your family if they have
saved any letters, journals, or diaries. My
aunt saved and then returned all the letters
my father wrote to her when he was in the
army during WWII. Perhaps your mother is
keeping her love letters from your Dad. I had
no idea that the autobiography of my Great,
Great Grandfather, JC Atkinson, existed until
I was interviewing my grandmother on her life
story and Great Aunt Mildred “remembered” she
had “grandpa’s letter about his life.”
If you want to go a step further, you can
search census and other records for bits and
pieces of family history. Personally, I am
longing to make a trip to Pawnee City and
Humphrey (the tiny towns in Nebraska where my
parents grew up in) to search the newspaper
archives for interesting articles about
several generations of my family and their
various businesses.
4. Make a List of
Chapters
My first family history project was a Family
History Cookbook. It started inadvertently
because one morning in early December I
decided I couldn’t live another day without
my grandmother’s recipe for Christmas
caramels. It took me about 15 minutes to
locate it. I just called my Dad and he had
the recipe but I didn’t anticipate that he
would then tell me the whole story about my
grandmother as a candy maker, how sugar was
about all they had in abundance for Christmas
presents during the Depression, and how
everyone in town wanted Grandma Amy to make
them Divinity at Christmas. Gradually the
book grew to include recipes for typical
holiday dinners down the generations as well
as creating a chronicle of what the Farm
Generation ate, what the Wonder Bread
Generation typically ate, and how my family
is eating today. Once I got started, I knew I
wanted recipes from my grandmothers, my own
family as I was growing up, and I even wrote
a chapter about C-Rations and things my
father was fed as a soldier on the front
lines in World War II. (Shocking! I said to
my Dad, “What they fed you doesn’t look all
that nutritious.” He replied, “They were
feeding people they didn’t expect would live
very long.” Yikes!)
Your book doesn’t have to be specialized like
a Family History Cookbook. You can include
anything you know or find out, but it is fun
to start by making a list of chapters for
your family history before you start
writing.
5. Other Sources
Once you know what you want to write about,
identify who is the “keeper of that
information” in your family. Perhaps there is
more than one person. I got lots of
information about growing up on the farm from
both my Dad and his brother. Great Aunt
Mildred had the only copy of JC Atkinson’s
autobiography. My cousin Lisa has my Grandma
Groeger’s cookbook with all her handwritten
notes. I heard that one of my great
grandmothers’ made great dipped chocolates
before there was even refrigeration; turns
out one of my Dad’s cousins still had the
recipe. She also told me some stories about
my Dad as a child and their grandparents that
I would never have heard otherwise. The more
sources you have for your family history, the
more windows you have on the past. It was fun
for me talking to all these elderly cousins
and Aunts and I might never have gotten to
know them otherwise.
Make a list of everyone in your family
(including neighbors and friends of the
family) who might be coaxed into telling you
fascinating stories about your family. It
helps if you share your chapters list to get
them started or come with a list of
questions.
Closing:
Again, individually, these projects do not
take much time or effort if you work on them
a little bit at a time. You start out asking
your mother a single question: ‘Who are the
people in this picture?’ and sooner or later
you end up with a family treasure of your
own; a personal and written record of your
family’s life. Good luck and good
hunting!
Dhyan Atkinson is a Consultant, Business
Skills Trainer, and the Family Historian for
her family. Although she works with all kinds
of small business owners, she specializes in
helping people start their own personal
history business. Over the past 5 years, she
has helped over 200 personal historians learn
the skills they need to find clients. Dhyan
can be reached at
Dhyan@SatisfactionByDesign.com or on her
website at SatisfactionByDesign.com
Article Source:
http://www.genealogysearchaustralia.com.au
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