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Keeping tabs for future generations |
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Written by asap
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Thursday, 06 July 2006 |
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If you’re like most people, your diary or journal is buried between the mattresses, stuffed in a secret drawer or hidden under the bed.
But sharing those writings with future generations in a few decades could shed light on your life, just as stopping to ask your own parents and grandparents what it was like when they were younger could offer insights to you.
Enter Dallas-area personal historian Glenda Vosburgh of www.yourlifescribe.com, who spends her days chronicling life stories for clients. Vosburgh does everything from write up little vignettes from short interviews to arranging family cookbooks to writing 300-plus page books on entire family trees.
Her theory behind the popularity of her services?
“We all have problems and we think how are we going to get through this and handle this,” Vosburgh says. “They had serious problems. They got through them. It might not have been easy, but that’s one thing we can learn is how they got through it.”
Vosburgh says she senses more interest in chronicling personal stories since the Sept. 11 attacks, when interests turned to home and family in a big way.
“We need a sense of being connected to our family and to our roots to kind of understand who we are and where we have come from and give us a clearer picture of where we’re going,” she said. “You can feel awfully alone if you don’t know something about the history of your family and the people who you come from.”
Vosburgh offered asap a few tips on keeping a good diary and getting a good record from older relatives. And if you’re already telling the world about your life in a blog? “Print it and keep it,” she says -- you never know what kind of technology will survive.
NOW AND LATER
Here are Vosburgh’s tips for keeping an accurate and regular diary if you hope to give your children and grandchildren an idea about your everyday life at the beginning of the 21st century:
1. Buy a new journal on the first day of the year. Make it part of your weekly routine to write in that book. It’s more organized this way; you can have a book for each year stashed in a box.
2. Don’t tell yourself that your life is too dull or nothing’s happening in your life to write about. “Even the day-to-day things can be so interesting later on,” Vosburgh said.
3. Don’t make writing in the diary or journal too regimented. “It gets too much like work that way,” Vosburgh said. “Make it accessible for yourself. Keep the book out where you can find it maybe not where other people can find it.”
4. Note birthdays, anniversaries or major accomplishments. “When I go back and do my genealogical research, boy it’s been like finding a little nugget of gold if I can find someone’s birthday in a letter or some date where it says so and so started a new job today,” Vosburgh said. “Your children and grandchildren are going to appreciate things like that so much later on, having a record of that.”
5. Forgot your diary and want to make an entry? Make notes to add later, like a scrapbook. “If I’ve been away, I don’t have a journal with me. I almost always have a piece of paper stashed somewhere and I’ve written things down that I really felt strongly about at the time. I staple it in. I have a three-page looseleaf entry when my little dog died three years ago.”
BACK TO THE FUTURE
If you’re looking to sit down with an older family member, say a grandparent, parent, aunt or uncle, to get a record of your family’s history, Vosburgh offers the following tips:
1. Make an outline of topics you want to touch on and have it handy during the interview.
2. Start with a broad question: When did your family come to this area and what first brought them here? “It takes them back far enough to get the history and most of the time they’ll start talking from there and you’ll get all these wonderful stories,” Vosburgh said.
3. Ask about school, when they graduated or how they met their mate.
4. For those alive during World War II some good questions: How did you cope by yourself when we had gasoline and food rationing? Tell me how did you earn money? if you didn’t have gas for the car how did you get around?
5. Ask where they were during major historical events. Come up with a big event and ask how it affected their life? This is especially good “if they lived through a really interesting period in history and we all do whether we think we do or not,” Vosburgh said.
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Want to find a personal historian? Contact the Personal Historians Association at: http://personalhistorians.org/
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asap writer Caryn Rousseau’s journal is highly unorganized.
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