Scrapbooking DOA: Anecdotal Tales

Anyone working on family histories or scrapbooks knows that "interviewing" people and getting stories about the past can really add personality and depth to the stories you're trying to tell.

If the person is speaking of their own past, you assume that a lens of time and emotion is applied to their stories whether they know it or not, but the essence of the tale is almost certainly true and worth noting.

When they speak of their contemporaries, including their parents or grandparents, a larger lens of refinement is applied depending on what relationships with those people have been.  These stories are valuable for inclusion because they help paint a larger picture for future readers, but you need to note somehow what these relationships are, or have been, so anyone would know it isn't necessarily an eyewitness account of events.

Anytime the person is speaking of someone from the past who they didn't really know or interact with themselves, I think marking these stories as anecdotal  (a short usually amusing account of an incident, esp a personal or biographical one...Free Dictionary) lets everyone know it is just a story passed along down the years.  As you're writing your own section, you might want to make things pretty clear, so your tale doesn't get enlarged or modified.  Could work.

As I'm going through old photographs, and getting birth and death and whatever other information is out there, I know I can't really bring the previous generations to life.  I do have anecdotal tales of some of the way back folks.  It seems to me that what survives as anecdotes is often not the everyday things in a person's life, but the out of the ordinary or borderline scandalous stuff.

Did this couple really have a line drawn through the center of the house and one side was his, and one was hers?  And did he "have a woman on the side"?

Even more Dept. of the Wierd...did this woman have such a strong constitution that she survived her Atlantic crossing in a barrel?  Did she use her iron will to arrange marriages, possibly including the unhappy one above?  Was there an opportunity to follow some love to California (which would have brought considerable relief to the locals) which she turned down?

I'm wondering if I should keep some of these stories in my own notes, or should I include them in just my own book and give everyone else just the facts?

The DOA Scrapbook: Ask Yourself the Questions You Wish You Could Ask

I had a conversation with a colleague one day who is a really avid family history researcher about making sure we let our children know some of the things about us that we wish we knew about our parents or grandparents. 

I've been thinking it can be easy enough to sketch in a life of someone else using facts, figures and mementos because we're just providing an overview. 

We assume somehow that our children know us well and that they won't have any questions about us they wish they could ask when we're gone.  Of course they will.  They don't ask for the same reason we never asked.  Because our parents were going to live forever and we could always talk to them any old time.  If only.

For your children's sake, make a list of questions you wish you could ask a parent, grandparent, or other ancestor no longer with you.  Just basic stuff that makes them a real knowable person.  Write down your own answers to those questions, and tuck them in a nice pocket page or on a journaling page in your family scrapbook.

That is why I like scrapbooks, they present a nice visual summary of people and events.  Each page can be a discovery or a fond memory.  You can see a whole person from photographs, memories, letters, notes.  Write your own page, because who knows you better than you?

National Day of Listening

It's always something, isn't it? Today is the National Day of Listening.

Because I've been trying to put together a sort of mixed media approach to family history for my family, I appreciate finding out that today is a day to interview and record people in your family to keep and playback in years to come.

As we all know, we often grow up listening to our parents and relatives tell stories about when they were growing up, and their families and experiences. We think we'll remember and if we don't, we can just ask that loved one.

The older you get, the more you realize that these people, no matter what a solid rock they are in your life, may just not be there for all the time you might wish. So photograph them, put them in movies, and do some sort of reminiscence about those important stories from their lives so you capture a bit to keep through the years.