LiveMemory and AI’s place in Genealogy
This may be an unpopular opinion but I’d like to wager a guess that at least a few in this genealogy community will understand when I say that LiveMemory, MyHeritage’s newest AI photo animation tool, freaks me out.
Heritage Journal - Maternal Grandpa, Phil Featheringill
How do you pull together the moments of a life you’ve never glimpsed?
How do you gather random facts about kin from the ether and create a story from the fragments of the past that makes sense in the present?
I don’t know the answers to these questions but I’m trying and trusting that the process of creating each spread in my Heritage Journal is weaving bits of each ancestor’s life into the tapestry of my own being.
Ancestral Musings + Shop Update
I recently took a few extra minutes while closing out the final farm chores to watch the heat lightening on the horizon and the full moon rise over the trees while the cool breeze blew around me and rustled through the cottonwood leaves.
The liminal space between Summer’s last breathe and Autumn’s golden beginnings always call me to slow down and pull into myself, to find gratitude in the abundance of the growing season and to wrap myself up in the quieter, coldest months.
Heritage Journal - Maternal Grandma, Eve Stanton
My Grandma, Eve Stanton, was (as so many of us are) wild & complicated, accomplished & haunted.
So, I knew that when I first sat down to work on her Heritage Journal spread, limiting myself to two pages would be a challenge. Truly, how do you boil 80 years into two pages when it’s supposed to represent the only Grandparent you really knew as a child and spent so much time with?
Heritage Journal - My Bio-Father, Michael
I knew when I started this Heritage Journal project that my paternal side would present my biggest challenges because this side of my lineage didn’t even truly exist my periphery until 2019.
There were no stories told to me as a small child about them.
No vacations filled with cousins or grandparents. No sights, smells, tastes, or memories to guide my way in the creation of each journal spread.
Heritage Journal - My Mom, Kerry
I know I’m not alone when I say that I had a difficult relationship with my mom.
With so many individual, familial, and societal forces at play, I’m honestly not sure our culture is set up to nurture and support our mother/daughter relationships in a very positive way, especially through the individuation years, try as we might.
And so, as I’ve sat with the Heritage Journal spread for my mom, my emotions have ebbed and flowed…
On being bold & queer, across generations
Thanks to my maternal Grandma’s writing, I know that Nancy was a Quaker and very much a “woman of her time”. She was expected to do things a certain way and expected the same of her 13 children. Which is why, when Hannah came along and didn’t exactly fall in line, she began telling her how “bold and queer” she was.
Deliria by Eve Stanton, 1933
I live in a room that is straight and bare,
With rings on my fingers and thorns in my hair
And I hear all night against my door
The pounding hands of the days before.
Journaling in Family History
Journaling is a passionate hobby of mine, a hobby I’ve happily begun weaving through various aspects of my family history documentation in a variety of ways.