Memoirs and Memories: Living a Legacy
I have just finished transcribing my great-grandmother’s diary, written in 1871 when she and her husband homesteaded in Nebraska,” wrote Faith Libelo. “What a wealth of interesting information about such things as how to prevent prairie fires from consuming the house, by plowing around it (successful) and how to prevent locusts from devouring the garden by covering it with linens (unsuccessful); all this in addition to genealogical tidbits.”
“I hope,” she continued, in an e-mail message to the more than nine thousand subscribers to the ROOTS-L genealogy e-mail list, “we are all creating such records for our own descendants.”*
Accounts such as Faith’s great-grandmother’s, spontaneous and fresh, tell of a lifestyle and value system quite different from ours. They add enormously to our knowledge and understanding of time periods and ways of life that we could obtain in no other way—not in history books, not in historical novels, not in learned literary essays. These letters will be treasured by generations of the families who follow.
Much of what we know of our national history would have blown away with the cannon smoke if the troops hadn’t written home about their sorrows and successes, their loneliness and triumphs. Without those letters and diaries, we would have only the official records and highly partisan newspaper accounts to chronicle the epoch. Only a relative few of those letters have escaped centuries of floods, fires, silverfish, mice, and over-zealous housekeepers, but they were enough to add the zest and color of real people to our understanding of the times.
Unfortunately, most of us don’t like to write letters; using the telephone is much easier. And even those with access to e-mail don’t always keep durable copies. Besides, most of us live humdrum lives focused on feeding schedules, dirty diapers, and rushing to join the daily traffic jam that separates us from home and office.
After surveying my quiet hometown with a jaded eye, a visitor from glitzy South Florida once asked me, “What do you do around here for excitement? Go to the barber shop and watch a haircut?” I imagine many of us think our lives are about as fascinating as getting a haircut. So what’s to write about?
Memorable Memoirs
Usually the essence of a powerful memoir is that it connects in some way to a historic theme or a public figure. It need not be something as epochal as the sinking of the Titanic, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, or the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. But anything you can see, hear, feel, or experience is fair game; you are observer as well as participant in the final years of the twentieth century.
Faith Libelo’s great-grandparents Ezra and Edith (Conrad) Peters were pioneers, and that role embedded them for all time in the history of this country. Their encounters with prairie fires and locusts were part of the experience of thousands of pioneer farmers in the 1870s.
So You Can’t Write?
Fortunately, written documents—letters, journals, diaries, magazine articles, letters to the editor, novels-are not the only kinds of useful memoirs. Maybe you’re among the verbally challenged folks who seem to get along fine without waxing eloquent. Even if you aren’t fluent with pen or computer, you can still build a trove of memory-joggers for your friends, relatives, and descendants in several other ways.
Cameras are getting cheaper. Photo processing is very fast and getting faster. Video cameras are readily available and tape cassettes for them are inexpensive.
No matter how, when, or where they’re taken, photographs should be carefully and fully provided with identification. A picture that can’t be connected with a person, a place, and a time is nearly useless unless it is artistically overwhelming.
Group photos can be especially useful to genealogists because people in group shots are almost always related to some common activity or family. Yet most really old group shots come with little or no identification of the subjects. A genealogist’s first concern with such photos (after preservation) should be to find out who all the people are and make a record of them, which can be attached to the photo.
In the modern world, we shoot thousands of photographs and miles of videotape while the toddlers cavort in the sandbox. Unfortunately many of us don’t recognize such things as genuine historical documents. Too often the idea seems to be that no one but our mothers would be interested in our ordinary life experiences. Most of us create such records routinely, without even thinking about preserving them. We need to recognize their value and try to save them for our survivors, especially since non-written mementoes can be even more vivid and poignant than the written kind.
Here are some examples:
Was Faith Libelo’s grandmother in Nebraska trying to write something for the ages when she vented her frustrations in her diary? More likely she was telling her diary because her neighbors on the frontier were few and far between, and her husband had already heard her story.
Heirlooms
One of the best topics for a letter or a journal entry is a family tradition. But many families also honor traditions that are non-verbal.
“Every child born in our family has received a knitted Victorian lace bedspread,” wrote Wendy J. Watson recently to ROOTS-L subscribers. Unfortunately, she said, the pattern for making them “disappeared when my mother passed away,” and she’s looking for a replacement pattern. Otherwise, she said, “I can no longer carry on my family’s tradition.”*
In my own immediate family, every newly-arrived offspring gets a hand-knitted Christmas stocking with his or her name knitted into the cuff. This tradition began with my wife, who has knitted one for each of our four kids, each of their spouses, and each of our grandchildren.
My great-grandmother Elizabeth A. (Crandall) Thurston, born in Niagara County, New York in 1836, started a much earlier tradition-the “Elizabeth Spoon”-which has now lasted through 157 years and six generations. She was, as far as we know, the first owner of a little silver baby spoon with a curled handle. She passed the spoon along to succeeding generations of Elizabeth Thurstons; currently it resides with my granddaughter, Lauren Elizabeth Thurston, born in 1993.
That spoon has survived some abuse over the years. A well-meaning baby-sitter once tried to straighten the curled handle, thinking that one of our kids had put the curl in it. The spoon survived re-curling and now is mounted on a wall plaque, with an engraved steel plate listing all its owners so far, with spaces for three more generations of Elizabeths. It now seems safe from further efforts at straightening. But the whole tradition had never been written down until I got the story orally from my Aunt Betty Thurston, who once had custody of the spoon herself before she conferred it on my sister Betty.
Written Traditions
We, during the latter half of the twentieth century, live in one of the most momentous periods of human history. For us to write gripping accounts of our lives, it is not necessary that we be talented authors; we need not be famous, or infamous, or fly to the moon or to Mars. We need not discover a cure for cancer. We need only the ability to recognize the possible significance to our progeny of insignificant things in our daily environment.
Do the Elizabeth Spoon, the Victorian lace bedspread, or the knitted Christmas stockings have any historical significance? Probably not, within the conventional meaning of “historical.” But within each family, each of those traditions reminds members of their origins and their kinships; they contribute to a sense of continuity within each family in ways that no other ritual could.
The diary entries by Libelo’s great-grandmother are certainly historical, because they describe frontier life as only a genuine pioneer could. And my grandfather’s hatchet reminds us of a bygone lifestyle, of slavery, the Civil War, and the way things were.
Every major event of world history, before and during our lifetimes, has affected us all, often in ways we probably don’t realize. These events give us the only excuse we need to create memoirs, even if our only survivors are “shirttail cousins,” in-laws, or total strangers. The things our survivors will read most avidly will be our accounts of our life experiences:
My thirteen-year-old granddaughter recently asked, “Grampa, what kind of TV did you watch when you were a kid?” She was literally startled—and a bit disbelieving—when I told her I had never seen a TV screen until just before I got married. The arrival of television was a major world event in my lifetime.
If your children or grandchildren are just reaching the “dating age,” what better time could there be for you to write a letter (no lectures, please) about your first crush, your first date, your first embarrassing experience on a date? About how you met your spouse? About which of you proposed to the other?
I remember when my father woke me late at night because he wanted me to hear a live radio news broadcast from Spain during the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Nowadays such a crackly, garbled broadcast would not be considered air-worthy. In 1936, it was a major technological accomplishment, comparable to another broadcast more than a quarter-century later: “Houston, the Eagle has landed.”
Did you watch the “fireworks display” in the sky over Baghdad during the Gulf War? You saw something that no one had ever witnessed before: the opening shots in an armed conflict on live television. You were witnessing, as it took place, an event that quickly found its way into history books, as well as diaries, letters, journals, and home videotape archives.
Guidelines
A few caveats:
You have unlimited opportunities to create a fascinating and valuable record of your life, your times, and your family, a record which your progeny will revel in reading. But the record will be squandered if it is not kept with care. Materials need to be protected from heat, humidity, water, bugs, fire, and careless destruction. Photos need to be carefully identified and dated; they also need to be made on, or copied to, durable materials. You need to communicate to your family your enthusiasm for building a record that they can all participate in and enjoy. If they know what you’re doing—and why—they’ll absorb your sense of the importance of keeping the project alive into the future.
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