Piecing Together Your Family Story
Sifting through family photo albums, Crystal Woodland stumbled upon her grandmother’s “patchwork”—a book her grandmother created twenty years earlier from family photos, stories, and leftover fabric scraps. At the front, a poem penned by Woodland’s grandmother:
Patchwork is the weaving together of
life itself, the times of triumph
and the memories of despair, the moments
of ceremony and the fragments of routine,
a history of the human condition for
generations past, present and future.
Patchwork is not simple in design, but
one of struggle for perfection. A
piecing together of peoples and
traditions to form our heritage.
Family history is just such a patchwork—one that can connect families by mere names and dates or by the experiences and tales that carry us from one generation to the next.
Weaving Tales
Woodland’s grandmother created her patchwork by mounting family pictures on pieced-together fabric and including brief stories to accompany each entry. It was a simple, yet one-of-a-kind, means of packaging her family stories. According to Sharon O’Brien, professor of American Studies and English at Dickenson College and author of her own family’s memoirs, The Family Silver: A Memoir of Depression and Inheritance, it’s not just the finished memoirs that hold value for a family historian, it’s also the spiritual and historical aspects of the journey of documenting those memoirs. “The process of writing is a process of discovery,” says O’Brien. “As I wrote [my family’s memoirs], discoveries came to me that wouldn’t have come before.”
Putting a family’s stories into words either via a novel, a documentary, a website, an oral history, or a scrapbook, is a growing trend among family historians. Yet, as generations mature, finding interesting ways to incorporate age-old stories with modern technology and busy lifestyles can pose somewhat problematic.
Woodland is choosing not to follow her grandmother’s patchwork—a time-consuming design that required her grandmother to type stories on scraps of fabric and rely on glue and lace for mounting—as she puts her own family’s story into print. Instead, Woodland has chosen to storybook her family’s life.
Storybooking—developing small storybook-like keepsake books that combine photos and text into a hardbound book that can be printed, shared, and saved—is quickly gaining popularity in a new g eneration of family historians. Technology has made the process of storybooking simple yet appealing. And, as a bonus, these short books help preserve stories about past generations, while involving multiple generations of a family in their creation. Plus, they’re short enough to interest even the youngest generations of a family, motivating everyone to learn more about his or her heritage.
Family Preserves
Woodland herself is fairly new to family history. But even as a mother with young children in tow, she is motivated to get her family’s story into words now. “I decided that I needed to write my grandpa’s life story,” says Woodland. “I wanted a story so his grandchildren and great-grandchildren could know the kind of man he was.”
Woodland started her storybooking project by interviewing her grandparents, aunts, and cousins, and then compiling these memories and family photographs into a book. The end of the book even features a section of first-person advice from a grandfather to his grandchildren.
Linda Barnes also chose storybooking. After Barnes’s mother died, Barnes’s father handed Barnes the journal her own great-grandmother had written. “You know,” he told her, “your mom really wanted you to read this.”
Barnes, a student at the time, took her great-grandmother’s journal home, but only glanced at it. One day, however, she was given an assignment in a journalism class that reminded her again of the journal. Journal in hand, Barnes combed through microfilms of the local newspaper for each day that her great-grandmother wrote. “I could make connections between things she talked about in her journal and things mentioned in the newspaper,” says Barnes. “Reading day after day, I started to feel like I kind of knew her.”
The journal inspired Ba rnes to write about her own life, thinking that one day her grandchildren might even find Barnes’s life interesting. And her journal-newspaper project eventually grew to extend beyond the classroom. “I gave a few copies to my cousins,” says Barnes. “They were fascinated by it. One of my first cousins has gotten interested in genealogy because of [my great-grandmother’s] journal.” Even some of Barnes’s friends have started researching their own family history because of Barnes’s project.
Involving Extended Family
Grandmother and family historian Donna Ledford successfully involved her extended family in the creation of her family story—a book that spanned one hundred years and focused on her grandfather’s family and their life on a homestead.
Ledford’s book project started one day when a cousin shared personal memories of the homestead and then wondered aloud what others remembered. Shortly thereafter the project was born with Ledford holding the reins.Using her family’s website, Ledford collected stories, photographs, songs, and poems written by or about her grandparents and their descendants. The compiled memories resulted in a 365-page bound book that Ledford debuted at a family reunion. “By the family dinner,” Ledford says, “I had sold every copy and had orders for more.”
Motivating Children and Teenagers
Developing an interest in family history in somewhat difficult-to-reach c hildren and teenagers was a side effect to the book that Ledford hadn’t anticipated—but one she appreciated nonetheless.“I’m just amazed at the younger generation,” says Ledford of the response to the family book. “My grandchildren have read the book from front to back. Now they are keeping journals because they understand leaving a record for future generations.”
Lori Hansen, a mother of four, remembers what family history felt like to her as a child—she was intimidated by the “binders and binders of family history” she saw when young. That intimidation stuck with her as she reached adulthood. “I never got into family history because it was overwhelming,” she says. “I didn’t know where to begin.” But when Hansen’s father died eighteen months ago, she decided it was finally time to act. “He had grandkids ages nineteen years down to newborn,” says Hansen. “I wanted them to remember their grandfather.”
Hansen spent hours with her grandmother, going through pictures, hearing stories, and developing a deep relationship. “That is when I really felt that deep urgency and deep love for creating these stories,” says Hansen. She set a goal—to fill a bookshelf with stories of her children’s heritage. “Instead of having Superman and other fictional heroes, I want my little boy to know that he has relatives who were heroes.”
Piecing Together Lives
It wasn’t always easy putting down her family’s life story but, as former journalism student Barnes reasons, “If I didn’t do it, who would?” While she was pressed for time, Barnes, like other family memoir writers, reasoned that this wasn’t just a self-centered act—the finished work would preserve her family’s heritage and the stories tha t comprised their lives for future generations.
“When you decide to tell your family story it doesn’t let you alone,” says O’Brien, as both a professor and family memoir writer. “I felt chosen, that I had to do it.”
Woodland, whose own journey started two decades ago when her grandmother created that simple patchwork of the family, understands this drive to tell the story all too well. And she relishes the way the process has helped her connect to her family—both present and past. “Once you start creating storybooks,” says Woodland, “you really start to appreciate your family, where you came from, what kind of person you are. And who you should be.”
Anastasia Sutherland Tyler is a contributing editor for Ancestry Magazine; Jeanie Croasmun contributed to this article. Special thanks to Sharon O’Brien, whose book The Family Silver: A Memoir of Depression and Inheritance, is available at www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/616649.html, Crystal Woodland, and Lori Hansen for their assistance.
Tackling a Story
Every life has a library of stories just waiting to be written. But rather than documenting every detail of a life, consider crafting your family’s memoirs—smaller snippets focusing a special event or even a single memory.The key, say both the experienc ed and the experts, is to keep the writing project from seeming overwhelming.
“Try not to make it a huge project,” suggests Crystal Woodland whose family history research has led her to write a personal collection of family stories—one at a time. “Start with a simple story,” Woodland says. “You don’t have to write the whole life story at once.”
Dickenson College’s Sharon O’Brien agrees. Don’t set out to write the story of your entire family history, she cautions. “If you feel called upon to write your whole family story it can be overwhelming,” she says. “Think ‘I want to write two pages or write for half an hour.’”
Not sure what to focus on? Try one of the following ideas:
- Love story—a first date, a marriage proposal, or a wedding
- Baby story—the origin of a person’s name or a snapshot of life when a person was bor
- Military story—the story of a veteran’s military service
- Holiday story—a special tradition loved by the family
- One-of-a-kind story—a graduation, reunion, or anniversary
Email This Post
