Thoughts on Writing Your Family History
When I was very young my mom and I would often visit my Grandma Eve, who lived less than 30 minutes from us, for the weekend.
Grandma Eve’s house was the only place a few things, like playing Chinese Checkers, eating chocolate covered cherries, playing with Pug puppies, and tap-tap-tapping on her old blue typewriter, would happen. During these visits I would also, regularly, asked her about our family history. I mostly wanted to know about her Grandpa John, who came to the US from Ireland in the mid-1800s, and her dad, Dutch, who was said to make the best Oatmeal Cookies on the planet.
Grandma Eve was a writer and a story-teller, a poet and a music lover.
Her life was built upon words read, spoken, and sung. Truly, as is my own.
She was not, however, by any stretch of the imagination, concise.
So I would ask what my young mind thought were specific questions and she would trail on for felt like forever on winding journeys through time and space into worlds that meant nothing to me and left me feeling very confused. At some point, I must have been 8 or 10 years old, I stopped asking questions because I simply didn’t feel like I was getting answers. Mind you, there were surely gems in those trailings, but they were lost on me…
Though not lost to me, yet.
Unbeknownst to me, it was also around this same time that she decided to get sober. She joined AA and at some point her sponsor told her she had to write down the stories that formed her existence so that the telling could aid in her recovery and healing.
And so, in the mid-1980s, she started writing what became the foundation of our family history and her memoir.
I don’t know when she truly dove in, or what her methodologies were, I just know that I have notes from 1984 and she passed in 1997.
In the months before she passed, with the help of an amazing Hospice volunteer, she spent a lot of time trying to get all of her paperwork and writings organized and completed. What was left to me was extensive, though not well organized to my mind, and definitely not complete.
But the bones were there…
Pieces of letters never sent that contained important details not listed elsewhere…
Multiple drafts of Part One of a book documenting our family history and her origin story…
A rough outline of time frames she wanted to include in her memoir…
Scribbles in notebooks containing doctor’s appointments holding clues to her mental and physical health throughout the decades…
Journal prompts and musings on lessons she learned from her parents and grandparents…
Magazine clippings and newspaper articles…
And so much more
These pieces of my Grandma’s life have taken me decades to pour through and understand and still I struggle to see the full picture.
I still don’t know if she wrote Part Two of our family history (it may be buried in a cousins storage or it simply may not exist).
And with my mom and her siblings all passed there are answers to questions none of us in my generation may ever know.
And yet, as overwhelming as it all is to think about pulling together into a cohesive story I can share with those of still alive, I know how truly important it is to try…
To best honor her…
And honor all who came before her…
And all who exist now…
And all who’ve yet to come.
On the flip side of this overwhelming amount of scrambled information, I have also been given two additional accounts by more distant cousins, each containing important pieces of my family history. Both of these documents are no less intense, but are much more concise.
The first is a handwritten letter of sorts, in storytelling form, that documents a branch’s trek from England to Ireland to the US. It was written prior to 1980 and is only eight pages long but holds a wealth of information.
The second is mostly notes typed on a computer in the late 1990s/early 2000s. It is only four pages long and contains not only very interesting insight into the writer’s personality, but life-changing information for multiple generations.
And so, as I wander through my thoughts on the importance of details and sharing as much information as possible as I move forward with my own documentation, I mention these here today as a reminder to myself (and you, Dear Reader) to do my best to stay out of my own way…
As a reminder to myself that documenting names and dates and important events doesn’t have to be complicated to be profound.
A history written in a single sitting may be just as life changing to kin down the road as an unfinished book that took over a decade to compile.
And so, I will challenge you to do the same.
Start simple. Then, add details and embellishments as time and space and new information come available.
Our family histories are living, dynamic entities and, despite our best efforts, they will never be complete. The best we can do is contribute to the stories of our lives and trust someone else in our line will add to it all when it’s their turn.
Onward,
Melis