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Those who know me, know how much I love family genealogy and family history. This hobby was passed down to me from my parents and I was probably a grade schooler when I first started filling out my first family tree. My husband also loves this hobby and his computer focused brain has certainly helped us keep our info organized over the years as we have merged research covering both his ancestry branches and mine. Before my Dad passed away early in 2022, my parents passed the torch to me as the family records and photo keeper. With memory issues, my dad was worried about accidentally deleting branches of his family research records. He had spent years compiling information so I understood his worry! It kind of worried me too.
My mom is still actively helping me work on our family tree and I think it will provide some opportunities for us to travel and research a bit together this Spring. Our family history is something I usually work on in the winter months. Gardening consumes a bit of my Spring and Summer, but those milder months are better travel times for research trips. So I always have access to our tree information on my phone!
Since I don't want to leave my genealogy records just as lists of names and dates for my children and grandchildren, I have begun the task of trying to write profile bios for members of our tree. Some day I hope to compile these biographical sketches into a book but for now each sketch is written as a stand alone profile.
If genealogy is your thing too, I encourage you to write down your ancestors' stories and share their photographs. Start with people you know best. For me I started with my grandmother, my mother's mother. My grandmother died in 2014 but my own children did remember her and I could focus on writing my story about her for them. It was fun to share her life as a young person and find photos of her in those years that I could share. Creating a timeline of her life let me outline the decades of her life and compare them to the historical events happening in those decades. This timeline helped me focus on things I wanted to mention about her life and also events happening around her that influenced her choices.
We might think our relatives were just boring and ordinary, but they have all lived through interesting times and challenges. There ARE stories to be shared and I encourage you to start. I wish I had started these sooner and had been able to share more of them with my dad, but I know he is proud that I am continuing to work on them.
One of my goals for 2024 is to write more. Some day I won't be here but perhaps my words will be. I will leave them in this blog, in my ancestor profiles and in my children's stories and board books.
You too have a story to tell... go out and tell it!
~ Connie
