Did your parents tell you about their growing-up days? Would your children and grandchildren like to read about how they coped during the Great Depression? The Second World War? What their teenage years were like?
What do you suppose your children and grandchildren would like to know about your own growing-up days? Do they know where you were born? Where you went to school? What you and your family and your friends did together?
I’m talking about writing for the future family about the past family. These memories are important to generations beyond our own. Since we’re the writers in the family, I think it behooves us to record them.
My grandmother wrote about growing up in Parry Sound, Canada, in the late 1800s. It’s fascinating. I wrote a composition in college about visiting my grandparents at Lake Lucy (where I live now) in days before power lines came to their cottage. It became the beginning of a collection of memories from my grandparents, my father, and my aunts and cousins about growing up in the early 1900s west of Orlando.
Letters
Are there letters written among family members that someone saved? What a treasure! Read them. Excerpt the parts that are memorable and turn them into a document for the family. Sometimes even the usually mundane comments about the weather become interesting when the weather is a hurricane!
Be sure to notate who wrote the letter to whom, and the date. If the date is not written on the letter, read the envelope’s postal stamp, if you can.
My grandmother, a school teacher, wrote a letter during the Great Depression that her salary had been reduced from $800 [for the ten months of the school year] to $400. But she had saved $10 for the summer, and she could buy “two large heads of green cabbage for a nickel, a large Sunday roast for fifty-four cents.”
Where else can you find that kind of information?
It’s too bad that emails are supplanting handwritten letters. Many important memories will be lost when the emails are deleted.
Listen!
Life was a lot different in your grandparents’ days. If they are still living, listen to their memories, write them down at the earliest opportunity. Ask questions: Did they walk to school? Ride a school bus? Ride a bike? When did they buy or build their first house? How did Grandpa court Grandma? How did they manage when they lived in a house with no electricity?
Continue gathering notes until you can get them organized.
Have you talked to your parents about their lives? Ask them the same questions.
Then start talking to brothers and sisters about what they remember from family stories and their own childhoods. Aunts and uncles and cousins, too. Maybe they will add priceless material to your document.
If you have a combined family, it seems to me it is even more important to record recollections and insights from both sides of the family.
Photos
Do you take photos? My grandmother took photos with what may have been an early Kodak Brownie camera. Many of the photos were saved as tiny “contact” prints – no bigger than the negative they were printed from. But she recognized the importance of many of them and enlarged them. They are precious pictures of days gone by – horse-drawn buggies, early automobiles, clothes of both adults and children, even the family’s first house, and landscapes.
Don’t forget to add photos of your own to your family document.
Sometimes it turns out worthy of publication.
My first effort was photocopied, assembled, and stapled at a copy shop. It was intended solely for the family and mailed to them. But then I found a few interesting documents in my parents’ papers, and began receiving messages from relatives who added some of their memories. I kept adding these new things to my little book until it was not so little any more. It had too many pages to staple.
My brother set it up for me in an attractive format, with chapter headings and page numbers and a few of my grandmother’s photos.
And it was published by Woodsmere Press.
And was offered to the public on Amazon.
And received a review that said, “I read this lovely book with my heart in my mouth and tears in my eyes.”
Charlene Edge
What a lovely and important topic reminding us of the importance of documentation AND sharing memories. This line made me laugh: “Sometimes even the usually mundane comments about the weather become interesting when the weather is a hurricane!”
Thank you, Peg.
Peggy Lantz
Thank you, Charlene.
Jack Courtney
One unique aspect of writing for the family is that the author is unique. Your grandmother may have documented much aspects her life with photos, letters, and the like. But you as the author made it into a story – one only you could tell in the way that you did. Thanks Peggy!
Katherine Dudley Hoehn
Good reminders and ideas! Oh the family stories we can tell! Thank you for this. Children of the future thank you, too. Emails and texts will be long gone but real correspondence, photographs, and memories can be preserved. One thing I did with my Dad was to give him a Fisher Price tape recorder (he wasn’t very savvy with any technology) and a list of questions and asked him to record his answers. Today they are a big part of the material I am using for the memoire/historical novel I am writing, along with more than 1,000 letters he wrote from WWII and earlier. So thank you for reminding us how important family documentation is!
alicia m. minor
What a great idea to share! Aside from the Bible, our family stories are also a treasure, something to be told and shared with the world. How nostalgic and memorable it will be if we see those stories in prints read by our children and grandchildren and the future generations following. I support and encourage this great idea. thanks Peggy.
Peg Lantz
Thank you, All.
Peg