Preserving Stories, Prompting Memories

 

Once a month, our local genealogical organization gathers for an informal meeting, simply to allow members to talk with each other about their research, interesting finds in local history, and, frankly, anything else of interest they'd like to discuss. We started that a few years ago as an antidote to the Covid-era online meetings, since members missed the opportunity to just talk with each other.

This week at our meeting, the subject turned to preserving family stories, regardless of whether our immediate family members cared to know about them. Concern about the loss of family stories—realized too late to go back and ask our grandparents or even aunts or uncles what we'd missed—weighed heavily on some of our members. 

One solution was to write those stories down as they came to mind. That may sound like a reasonable solution. Just do it: sit down and write. But some members realized that they had experiences in life, things that had happened years ago, that they had since forgotten about. If it weren't for someone jogging their memory—a random question from a family member or friend—the situation would never have come to mind, let alone take form with pen on paper.

Those of our members who have been gifted with some of the recent products marketed to help us preserve our family stories had a quick response to that predicament. They discovered that using such products caused them to stumble upon such forgotten memories. The writing prompts jogged their memories, sometimes even prompting them to wander through a series of memories, before they started writing.

One member is nearly done with a year-long writing program given to her by her family last Christmas. She's been quite diligent to regularly work through the program, and has been surprised at the personal or family experiences she's actually forgotten over the years. Now that is down on paper, soon to be included in the book that will be published from her work. Hopefully, the writing prompts represented the very questions her (now grown) children would someday wish they had thought to ask.

We all have questions we wish we had thought to ask our elders when we had the opportunity. Leaving our own breadcrumb trail of stories may help the next generation when it's their turn to wish they had thought to ask.