Where Do You Get Your Stories?

When I first started blogging, I was blogging just to record my Hero's stories about his early years that he had shared for many years, but had never written down. As time has gone on, I had most of his stories written down, his siblings have added a few, and I turned to other members of the family for stories.
I have been blogging for 9 years now and have found I haven't stopped learning. The other day I was repeating something my son told me to a friend, and had to take a mental pause when I realized I had a story that bore writing down and sharing with future progeny.
I will share, for it is a funny...
My son was visiting with my 88 year old mother. She has dementia that is somewhat controlled by medication (meaning she still remembers things, but can't stay in the positive world long enough to act on what she remembers). The son likes to banter with her, so he asked her if she was going to live to be 90.  She looked at him quite manner of fact and said "of course".  He pushed it... "well will you live to be 100?"  She looked at him incredulously and said "why would anyone want to do that?" The laughter the response brought brightened the whole visit and those who were nearby in the common room of the assisted living my mom lives at. He came home chuckling and sharing what she said. This is a great story for recording.

My mom with my grandson and myself.

When this understanding sunk in, I realized I am missing many things I should be recording other than my personal  journal and the scouring for ancestor's stories. Okay, I hear you now... Duh, Fran you are the family historian. You should be recording even funnies. I know, I know, I need to keep my mind open to all possibilities. This has become so very important to me. I really don't want someone sitting and looking at my picture and saying I wish she could tell me about herself, like I have done over my grandmothers.

You might wonder why I would spend a blog post on my own ponderings. I suppose I have a feeling of grandeur that maybe my thoughts just might reach out to at least one person and they too will begin to write down even the small daily actions and funnies that might give a feeling of closeness and fun to those that follow. Joy in the ordinary.

See ya'all next month from your Texas genealogist. 😊

Do You Record Your Thoughts?

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This month I am writing to you from near Weatherford Texas.  Man and I worked hard for 3 days packing up and made our escape from SE Michigan and ran south as fast as we could get here.  Sadly, we did not out run the polar vortex.  It is cold here too. And, it just might snow here in the next 24 hours.  As long a we don’t run out of propane we can stay comfortable in our beloved Tana.

As Man and I run hard from the current polar vortex affecting just about all of the USA, I wonder, do you ever record where you were, what you were doing, how you felt etc., during these historic events?  

For example:  Where were you when the twin towers came down?  Where were you when J.F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas Texas?  How did you feel when a female was voted into political office, or the first female became a Supreme Court Judge.

Here is what I recorded in my data base about the resignation of President Nixon, you may note, snicker,  we were camping at the time.

"Resignation of President Nixon, August 9, 1974: We were camping in Harrison, Michigan in a Michigan State Park, tent camping.  We met some people in the campground that were "locals", and when we heard the reports that Nixon would be resigning, they went home and brought back a small black and white television.  In 1974, tent camping, we took only necessities, and televisions were not considered a necessity.  We plugged the television in with a few extension cords and sat in our lawn chairs and watched him make his resignation speech and walk to the helicopter, turn and wave good bye."

Have you recorded where you were and how you felt about events that were not necessarily historical in quite the same way?  For example, what was your first cell phone like, when did you get it, and what did you pay for it?  How about your first black and white television, your first color television, your first computer?  How about simply recording what you paid for your current techy toys, your tablet, your cell phone, your computer, you current flat screen television.

Record your social media posts?  There’s an app for that.  SocialSafe, now digi.me,  allows you to down load many of your posts and threads from Facebook and other social media to your hard drive.  Even photos you may have posted will be saved with your threads.  I have not done so, but you can create PDF’s with their software, that means printable.  (As a side note, I personally had some issues with the software, and I have to say, the staff at SS, now, digi.me, were delightful to work with.  Some of what they asked me to do to help them gave me fits, but, they stuck with me and worked me to the solution.  Also note, that at this time we were dealing with the death of a family member, so, let’s be honest, I was not fully functional, eh?)

Keep a journal?  Maybe you are not into social media.  Do you keep a journal, or do you record such feelings and reactions and visions on your family data base? My favorite go to place, is my data base, of course.  I keep photos there, documents there, and memories there.  Not just stories of my ancestors, but, stories like where was I during the Nixon resignation, or poems someone wrote, or special birthday/anniversary cards.  I view it this way, if I would be interested in what my ancestor did or had or said or thought, then, I hope, that maybe, my descendants will be interested in what I did, or thought.  So, I record it.

Do you Blog?  Yes, a Blog can be a wonderful place to record your reactions to events, and you may be doing so without even realizing it.  Review your posts, if there are some that are special, consider saving them as PDF files, or word processing files, and attaching them to your data base.

Did you know you can print a book from your Blog?  There are several online companies that can accomplish a printed version of whatever blog posts you want to include in a hard copy.  



There are many methods of saving your thoughts on history and events. But, first you must write them down, somehow, somewhere - - Are you??





* I am in no way affiliated with SocialSafe, aka digi.me.  They have not asked me to review their services, have not offered me any special services or deals if I do so.  I use the product and have been happy with them.  This should not be considered an endorsement, just a suggested site for you to investigate.  For further disclaimers, please visit Reflection's page, Disclaim THAT! Beholden to - -, for further info on this.

** Graphics courtesy of Dan's Clipart Library and Free Clip Art Now, clker.com and other online web sites.

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Are We Losing The Art of Written Communication?

What do you prize the most of an ancestor's that you never met?  For me, it is letters. It is like reaching across time and having a portion of their thoughts and their handwriting, which is a physical portion of them. Many I don't have pictures for, but I have little a bit of their personality.  For that reason, I treasure letters I have saved of aunts who wrote me when I first married.  Books written by two ancestors, Lemuel Roberts and William Bradford have been wonderful too.
What brought this to mind was some events that occured the last week with some grandchildren.  The oldest is always on the go, so I will text her and she can text me back later.  Hmmm... not a lasting communication and usually is generic conversation.  The next to the oldest, I called.  Conversation went like this... "Hi! How are you doing?"  "Good." (Now I have to start digging to get past good...)  Once again, not great communication nor lasting.
My sweet aunt never called, although there were telephones. This is an example of a letter from her.

My great great grandfather wrote a letter to his nephew that was saved and has been passed around to countless descendants.  It tells what he thought about, and what was happening with his family for us to read, savor, and glean information from. 

You notice he put the place and date at the heading. Forgotten art of letter writing? 

The Hero wrote a letter to his daughter when he arrived home after visiting with her. She still loves it now that he is gone.

After contemplating today's texty and techy world, I have decided I am going back to writing letters to my granchildren, especially those that live over a day's ride from me. I will start putting a special message in Christmas cards for family that I communicate with in my handwriting not a computer generated message.  

What do you think?

See you next month. 

Hummer.

How’s That Bio? Tell Their Stories

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Recently we had a very unexpected death in our family.  I opened my data base and went to this relative’s place and opened the notes and realized there were very few. That entire part of my data base was seriously lacking.

To me family research is more than the simple recording of dates and places.  It is the “notes” the story telling, the photos, videos, documents, multimedia.

Here is a sample of just a few images, the multimedia of my great grandfather, Charles Gratton Trumbo.  His death certficate, a photo of Charles, a photo of the home he raised his children in, his headstone, some receipts dated 1898 (two loads of "bark" and one of "hay") and the home where he was raised.

In the case of this family death, I found I had failed miserably.  I did have over 25 multimedia events attached, photos from birth.  I had marriages and children recorded.  But, there was almost nothing in the “notes” section.  I had written a piece or two about this relative on my personal blog, Reflections From the Fence.  But, the truth is, I had basically failed in my duties of family researcher and family recorder.  Did you hear that long sorrowful sigh?

I have frequently reminded others when they are sharing stories (these kinds of stories show up frequently in the Newsfeed of Facebook), to add them to their data base.  It is easy to forget to do that.  That little story about your relative, maybe the one about gramma eating dog food thinking it was a appetizer??  Or the one about the infamous card game and who skunked who.  Stories about favorite vacations.  Share information about your relative’s occupation.   Have some interesting insight as to why your relative chose his or her occupation, share it in your “notes”.

I have had family members record pages of memories of growing up, schools, holiday celebrations, their thoughts on the death of celebrities, and especially every day minutia.  These memories, these stories become what some researchers call the “color” of their data bases and their family stories.

And, oh, don't forget to record color for yourself, your parents, your siblings, your children, your grandchildren.  Wouldn't you just love to have stories about your great-great grandparents, their memories, maybe journals or diaries.  I have a very few, I am greedy, I would love to have more.  If you have journals, letters, diaries, have you recorded them in your data base?  Have you transcribed them?  Do you have images of each page?  

Share the color, hopefully you won’t open your data base to find a white, empty page staring back at you.  I failed.  I pray you can learn from my lesson, make your data base colorful.

* Collage courtesy of Collage.com
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Family Heirlooms and Memories Traveling Style

This month Man and I will be wandering from East Tampa back to SE Michigan to our stick built home.  I hope to do a bit of research along the way, maybe visit some friends and family along the way and see some "new to us" sights.

Family history is a large part of who I am and what I do.  And, I live in a RV for months on end.  I don't want to just leave all of my memories, heirlooms and such back in Michigan.  I want them with me, if possible, in some form.

So, I thought I would share a few of my ideas with you, how I take my family history with me.

One way is the photo headboard in Tana's bedroom.  These are small framed mirrors, the mirrors being covered with family photos.  I can change them out if I want to.  Man and I get a lot of joy out of this "headboard", his parents, my parents, and our children and grandchildren reside here.

We also have some framed photos I can put out, and a digital photo frame.

Over the years I have been blessed to have been given a number of family heirlooms.  I have to leave them behind in the stick built home while we travel in our rolling home, Tana.  Sometimes I do miss having my family artifacts around me.  I found a way to get around the times that my heart yearns for connectivity to my family and the heirlooms.  I have on my data base, Legacy, a special field/fact I have developed called, "Heirlooms".  I photo heirlooms I have care of, and place the photos in this fact.  I can then look at the photos of them any time my little heart desires.  Here, for example are some old bottles out of the family farm in Virginia.

Or how about this lovely wooden bucket that was produced at the plant my grandfather worked at for many years, my father procured it and gave it to me:

When I am feeling a little homesick, open Legacy, have a long healthy look. Works for me every time.

(By the way, I wrote about this back in October of 2011 when I was still using RootsMagic for my data base.  You can read about it here.  This graphic is from the RootsMagic version, in reality, it is not that much different in Legacy.)

One of my favorite "take the family memories with us" tricks is to take plants with me.  Here is a box full in travel mode.  They are packed tightly in a waterproof box.  When we stop for a week, they are taken out and set about the RV.

Inside that box are two spider plants, here is one.  They were given to me by my grandmother many, many years ago.

This philodendron is from Man's mother.

This, which I cannot remember the name of, was a gift from one of our sons.  Yes, it is blooming.  This photo was taken during the first week of April 2014.

I also happen to carry another box of plants, violets, a favorite house plant of mine.

Carrying my family with me when I travel, a very good thing.


 

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