Ancestry Magazine

In 1880, my great-great-grandmother Anna Louisa Anderson, her husband Anders, and their two children immigrated to the United States from Sweden. Anders was a shoemaker who earned two dollars a week. Anna bore fourteen children, four of whom died in infancy. When she was seventy, Anna fell and broke her hip, which left her bedridden for the last five years of her life. A woman of industry, she nevertheless found ways to keep busy, quilting and making rag rugs as well as patching clothes for the family, all from her bed. Her daughter Alice, my great-grandmother, cared for her while raising her own family of seven children and helping her husband with the farm.

I know all this because Alice took advantage of her mother’s presence in her home to write her mother’s personal history as well as her own. Both handwritten documents are barely ten pages long. Like many children of her era, Alice left school after only a few years of school to work so her writing skills were not extraordinary. With the demands on her time, she could have left these histories unwritten. How glad I am that she didn’t.

Wouldn’t you like to find ten pages of personal history from one or more of your ancestors? Do you have questions about your family history that might have been answered by a written r ecord of their life? If our ancestors didn’t write their stories, we can’t change that fact. But we can all leave a record that will be treasured by our families in the future.

Start Small
Most people spend five to ten minutes every day standing in lines, waiting at red lights, having their oil changed. Consider that in those ten minutes you could write half a page. Twice a week would give you one page. With fifty-two weeks in the year, you could have more than fifty pages written of your life story.

My father, who is in his mid-seventies, is currently writing his personal history one memory at a time. He types a page or so on his computer every week. Whenever I talk to him, I ask him questions about his life, his stint in the military, his college years, and so on, partly for my own benefit and partly to keep his memories churning.

If you’re comfortable with a computer, try typing a page, or even a paragraph, every day. You might even try one of the numerous software packages available for writing your personal history. If you’re not comfortable with a computer, buy a small notebook that you can carry with you. Write a few sentences or jot down whatever ideas come to you throughout the day: your second-grade teacher, your dog Howard, your mother’s mouth-watering scones, your trips to the mountain with your cousins, the summer you broke your arm playing football.

It’s all right if you start with just a fragment of memory. Don’t worry that you can’t remember more. When you start writing your stories, chances are you’ll remember other stories and then dozens more after that.

“Sometimes people are reluctant to start writing because they can’t remember something,” says Charley Kempthorne, author of For All Time: A Complete Guide to Writing Your Family History. “It’s a shame we can’t remember everything we want to when we want to ” [but] the simple act of writing can make memories come. “. It’s a bit of a paradox to try to write about something that you don’t remember, but a single image can lead to another image, then to another, and so on” (p. 21).

Get It Down on Paper
Lois Daniel, author of How to Write Your Own Life Story, suggests that you begin with two notebooks. (Her ideas can be readily adapted for use with computers.) One notebook is your “memory bank,” where you write various memories and details of your life as they come to mind. “These facts,” she promises, “will gather `interest’ just like a savings account.” As you read over your notes, you will remember other details and stories, some similar, some very different, from the memory that sparked them. Write these down, too. Don’t be surprised when the memories come even faster than you can write them.

As your memories from the first notebook expand and grow, start writing stories in your second notebook using the notes and ideas from the first notebook. You can begin your story at your birth and proceed chronologically if you’d like. Or just write whatever story comes to mind. Write one event per page, skipping every other line, in case you remember other details you want to add later. Add a date or timeframe. Later, you may want to put these pages in chronological order in a 3-ring binder and fill in the gaps between the stories as other memories come to your mind.

Another option is to use 3 x 5 cards to write the events of your life. Give dates where possible, and the name of schools attended, teachers and other individuals of significance, pets, vacations, etc. You can always add more cards. Now put them in order. From here you can write or type them up, adding to them as your memories flourish and expand.

According to Terrie Lynn Bittner, author of Writing Your Personal and Family History, “If you set aside an hour every Sunday to work on it, you will find your mind will soon start to generate memories through the week. On Sunday, you need only pick one out. Write about that event in your life. Don’t worry about getting things written in order. If you write about an event that feels vivid or meaningful that day, you will do a better job of it.”

Or perhaps you would rather begin by writing a brief summary of your life as it is right now. Then the next time you sit down to write, you might decide to write about how you chose your career or how you felt when you moved into your new home. Next, you might want to describe your wedding day, the birth of your children, or a goal you had when you were younger. Each topic you write about will connect to an earlier event or a similar feeling.

The Options Are Limitless
If you’ve put off writing your personal history because it’s so intimidating and so large a task, take heart. There are many ways to put together your life story. You may simply choose to begin as my great-great-grandmother Anna did, “I was born “” and then write what happened next, and then next. She went on to describe her schoolroom, her teacher, and her daily lunch, which “consisted of a piece of salt herring, cold potatoes, rye bread and a small bucket of milk.”

Then she described the bread in detail. “The rye bread was called `Kuekebrod’ and made like a pancake that was about eighteen inches in diameter, one fourth inch thick, and a circular hole in the center about three inches in diameter. After this `Kuekebrod’ was baked, it was strung on poles about twelve feet long and put in the attic for future use. Two or three bakings would generally last a year. It was no trouble for a native to eat this bread, but almost impossible for one who has eaten soft bread all his life.” (From Life Narrative of Mrs. Louise Anderson )

If you’re not comfortable with your writing ability, consider Alice with her third grade education, or Anna, who spoke English as a second language. Like her, you may feel more comfortable recruiting help in telling your story. In fact, regardless of your comfort level in writing you r story, working with a partner has many benefits. In swapping stories, your memories will become even more alive. You may want to work closely with a sibling who shared many of the same life experiences in childhood or a close childhood friend. Two people working toward the same goal will help divide the work and will keep each other motivated and on target.

You can even tape record the stories you share with one another, then type them up. You may even want to label the tape cassettes and keep them for your grandchildren. After all, wouldn’t you be interested in hearing your great-grandfather’s or grandmother’s voice? Some time in the future, your children and grandchildren will be thrilled to have your voice on tape.

“You don’t have to be a great writer to create a fascinating personal history,” wrote Terri Lynn Bittner. “Remember that you have an audience that has come prepared to love you. What they will want from this history is a sense not only of what you did, but of who you are.”

If you’re still not convinced that you can write a page or even a half a page, you may find writing lists more to your liking. A list also has a story to tell, and it’s very simple to do. Write a list of favorite vacation spots, jobs, teachers, television or radio programs, old girlfriends or boyfriends. You may even want to add a brief description of each one while it’s fresh in your mind. Or you may want to return to your list later and add a few more details, after your subconscious has dwelt on these memories for a while.

Just remember: you don’t need to write your entire life all in one day, and your descendants won’t be demanding perfection of you. They will be happy with whatever you leave them—ten pages, a hundred pages, or a list of favorite things.

Begin Right Now
For now, begin with the basic structure. Start with you and tell where and when you were born. Now tell a little about your parents. Later you may want to write about your paren ts’ lives in greater detail. A concise personal history might describe a few of your childhood memories, your school days, your friends, favorite toys, pets, or it may simply tell where you grew up and what work your father did.

The next part of your life story may discuss work, dating, courtship, marriage, your children, some significant events of family life. If you have children, write about them, give their names, birth dates and places, and their talents and abilities. Include changes in your life due to retirement, relocation, career changes, etc.

Remember that a personal history can be more than your own written word. Put your photographs in chronological order and label them. Compile your letters to and from family and friends (keep copies of your own, or ask your friends to return yours for this purpose). Ask everyone in the family to gather, or visit them individually, and using a tape recorder, record their memories as well as the events in their present lives.

Your Legacy to Future Generations
My great-grandmother Alice Anderson Baugh died eleven months after I was born. Perhaps she held me in her arms and I looked up into the blue eyes that evidenced her Swedish heritage. Of course I didn’t know then that I was in the presence of a great woman, one who had milked cows and made butter, who cooked on a coal stove, who nursed children through scarlet fever and whooping cough, who endured the death of a child at six weeks, the death of a son when he was twenty-one years old, and her husband fifteen years before her own death. For four years she worked in a hospital for war veterans, where men had lost arms, legs, sight, hope. We share a common experience in caring for our mothers who were both bedridden the last five years of their life. All this I learned from her ten-page personal history—one that I will treasure always.

Valerie Holladay, a contributing editor of Ancestry Magazine, began writing stories about her fami ly fifteen years ago after taking a family history writing class during graduate school.