Growth of a Family Historian

From the age of twelve, learning about family and family connections has been my favorite thing to do.

I came home from school one day, and my grandmother was sitting at our round dining room table, surrounded by papers, books, and exotic looking old pieces of paper. I later found out these were birth, death, and marriage certificates she had collected over the years.

She realized I was genuinely intrigued, and to her credit, she gave up her valuable research time to teach me the basics of completing pedigree and family group charts. I was hooked! My parents encouraged my interest by getting me my own “Book of Remembrance,” which I lovingly completed and updated over the years.

Next, I became the family history packrat for the whole family. I kept journals, souvenirs, baptism, and funeral programs, photographs by the hundreds. Every new family event was entered somewhere into either my paper records, a journal entry, or, more recently, my computer programs.

Over the years, as my grandparents, parents, uncle, and aunt passed, I became the beneficiary of their collections. Eventually, I had one room in our home, which was entirely family history related. The problem was there was so much it was overwhelming. Each time I tried to organize it, I would end up visiting “Memory Lane,” and very little organizing was taking place. Besides that, I was gathering my family memories related to my children and my late husbands’ family. It all became too much. I knew I had to create order but had no idea of where to start.

I researched different organizational plans, even started with a few, but they were all time consuming and overwhelming. The boxes of memorabilia increased, and I was no closer to a solution.

Then I began to study towards a family history qualification. I learned about different types of evidence. I learned to identify primary, secondary, and derivative sources, and lots of other terminologies that sometimes seemed confusing. Gradually, however, I began to remember items in my collections that I knew fit a specific definition, and I would go into the boxes and look for them.

Some of my assignments involved writing about my ancestors. Each of those assignments made me look at the information, photographs, and souvenirs with new eyes. Sometimes with emotion, sometimes with a clinical and skeptical eye, but looking. I began to dig for the stories that these items were telling me. Combined with the memories I had of those individuals, I began to write their stories.

I panicked when I realized that only two other people were still alive who knew the people I was researching, and frighteningly, their memories were fading. I started asking lots of questions, probing ones. I regretted not asking these kinds of questions earlier when my parents and grandparents were still alive. I also faced the reality that my memories were fading. I felt compelled to start recording and making notes of my own life. I started asking my siblings questions and using prompts to help me remember.

Finally, the boxes of photographs were digitized. I let someone else do the actual scanning to avoid the “Memory Lane” distraction. I obtained some arch lever files and acid-free plastic sleeves and began to sort the papers by individual. I loosened up on perfectionism and aimed for just sorting.

Wonder of wonders, I have real family stories. The people only I remembered previously have come alive for my family. I finally feel that the legacy I was bequeathed has meaning.

• Posted in: family history ♦ genealogy ♦ Memories ♦ Stories