Telling (Family) Tales
My in-laws came for a short visit recently and they were at once drawn to the Ancestor Wall in our dining room, which holds the best of the few photographs we have of our parents and grandparents. After lunch, I brought out the rest of the photos and this started my brother-in-law down memory lane, telling the stories he remembered knowing about their parents and grandparents from his childhood.
He’s a few years older than my husband, who hadn’t heard some of the details of their father’s birth in South Africa, the tragedy that sent their widowed grandmother back to England, on her own with five children, and the less than warm welcome she received turning up at her father’s small flat with five small mouths to feed. Having no room for them all, the two oldest boys, including my father-in-law, went to an orphanage and the only girl was ‘given away’ to an aunt and uncle with no children of their own. The two youngest stayed with their mother.
This was the way of the post-war world in England, or any myriad places around the globe. Stiff upper lip and get on with it. I think that’s one of the reasons family stories are so rare. The people who lived through them didn’t see anything remarkable about them. Their lives were bleak and hard, with brief moments of laughter and joy sprinkled amid the business of everyday survival. If we were lucky, they’d mention something in passing, dropping a random memory about a person they knew or a place they’d been. When we were kids, the adults often sent me and my cousins to play elsewhere while they talked over coffee or beers at the kitchen table but sometimes, if we were quiet, they’d forget we were there. After a few drinks the stories could get quite entertaining, but I didn’t realize how valuable they actually were.
Our conversation then turned into an exchange of family stories from all sides, and the lament of how the stories vanish once someone no longer knows them. We assume everyone in the family knows about the spinster aunt, who had a career and owned her own home in the 1940s. In this case, we didn’t but I uncovered a couple of newspaper articles and was able to give more than just her name to our family tree. She was still alive in the 1980s and we never knew her. I’ve made it my mission not to forget her, or others like her. I’m going to continue to find out as much as I can about them and document it.
I’ve been a family historian/genealogist for a long time now. I began researching my family history in 1997, the old-fashioned way, well before the benefit of online records and data. Don’t get me wrong, I love being able to peruse old records and documents from the comfort and convenience of my iPad, but part of me misses the Wednesday nights and Saturday mornings spent in a dark and dusty room at the Family History Center filled with tables, chairs and machines for reading the microfilms sent from the main library in Salt Lake City. The Mecca of genealogists around the world.
The internet was helpful in connecting serious genealogists (the only kind there were, back then) to repositories at county courthouses, city records offices and the National Archives. We were able to obtain instructions, forms and addresses to request copies of vital records as these offices were beginning to realize the “cash cow” that is genealogy research. A good day was when I received a death certificate in the mail for a long-time gone relative, it was the right person, AND it held the correct birthdate or name of a parent.
After a year or so, I’d amassed an impressive collection of names, dates, and places, with the corresponding records and documents painstakingly confirmed and annotated. I was proud of my accomplishment and anxious to share it with my siblings and cousins. I made each of my siblings a binder weighing over four pounds (I know because I mailed them) filled with copies of my work, meticulously indexed and tabbed, including translations and footnotes. For my cousins, I separated the documents and reports by family line, scanned them into groups, and offered to send them if they were interested.
Over the years, I’ve received one of two responses to my accomplishment. Either crickets (no response) or TELL ME MORE, I NEED TO KNOW MORE, FIND OUT MORE, after they devoured the year of my life’s work in no time flat. It’s like planning and executing a six-course meal for twenty people. Three of them don’t show up and the rest consume every bite in a matter of minutes, then sit around talking about what they’d like for breakfast the next morning.
A couple of years ago when I was preparing to apply for my Irish passport, one of my cousins happily informed me of some specific family history details, because ‘they had the documents.’ I just smiled and said that I knew that indeed they did, because I was the one who provided the documents to them for their passport to begin with. It’s like they remembered the meal, but not the person who lovingly prepared it. The memory of the meal no longer belongs to the chef who prepared it, but the diner who enjoyed it.
Every so often, someone from the younger generations of my family becomes interested, connects with me as the keeper of our genealogy, and the cycle begins again. I assure the ancestors that it’s okay, these conversations keep them alive in our hearts and in our own stories. That I’ll never forget, and I’ll make sure the stories are safe with the next caretaker when I’m ready to join them. My stories will be going too at that point. I will continue to prepare the details of our family, and gladly serve them to the family members who crave the knowledge of who we are. I do it for the ones who came before me.
Family stories are a rare and precious gift. There are only so many stories to begin with, and an even fewer number of them survive more than a couple of generations. If you remember something your grandmother told you about her childhood, or her parents, or her aunt Margaret who was always a little odd, write it down now before you forget. Keep a notebook with you and jot a few lines when you see something that reminds you of your uncle or a cousin when you were kids. Be the author of your own stories. Write about the things that happened to you, and the things you saw happening to other people. We live in a world of constant and immediate connection, but extraordinarily little substance. Sit around the table with coffee or a beer and encourage your family and friends to share their stories by sharing your own. Let the kids listen.
What is remembered, lives. Tell your stories. Tell their stories. All of them. Even the ones they never wanted anyone to know. Especially those, really.
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