Recently Pauleen Cass attracted a good bit of interest with her guest post at the A to Z Blog. In the post Pauleen described how she created a blog-to-book via Blurb. In this current post at Wrote By Rote Pauleen discusses more about preserving family history for future generations.
Blurb book - interior (Photo credit: Mrs. Gemstone)
Family history is my passion and joy: the stories of the generations who have gone before me. While the basic biographical details provide the necessary building blocks, taken alone this data is boring and unengaging. What really captures my imagination is the opportunity to squeeze official and unofficial records for every drop of information about an ancestor until I can get a sense of each one as a person, their life experiences, the times they lived in, and the challenges they faced.
None of my ancestors was wealthy or famous yet there is a rich vein of stories to weave into a unique family tapestry. Over the years my research has broadened to include families from the same regions of origin so it’s possible to see what’s “normal” or “typical” in terms of education, employment, migration and mortality: a micro-study in history.
Blurb book - interior (Photo credit: Mrs. Gemstone)Family history is my passion and joy: the stories of the generations who have gone before me. While the basic biographical details provide the necessary building blocks, taken alone this data is boring and unengaging. What really captures my imagination is the opportunity to squeeze official and unofficial records for every drop of information about an ancestor until I can get a sense of each one as a person, their life experiences, the times they lived in, and the challenges they faced.
None of my ancestors was wealthy or famous yet there is a rich vein of stories to weave into a unique family tapestry. Over the years my research has broadened to include families from the same regions of origin so it’s possible to see what’s “normal” or “typical” in terms of education, employment, migration and mortality: a micro-study in history.
It would be rare to find a family historian who doesn’t wish they’d asked questions of their relatives and listened to them while they were still alive. Unfortunately when we’re young and busy with family and career that’s rarely a focus for us and then it’s too late. So, getting into proactive mode, I decided to pre-empt that for my descendants.
Firstly I joined in the 52 weeks of Personal Genealogy and History in 2011 hosted by Geneabloggers and designed by Amy Coffin of the WeTree Genealogy Blog. This gave me guided opportunities to dredge my own memories of childhood and growing up and to search out old photos to illustrate the stories. One might expect that people around the world would have very different experiences but I was surprised to find just how similar the life experiences were for fellow bloggers of a similar generation, even in that pre-digital, pre-internet era.
Firstly I joined in the 52 weeks of Personal Genealogy and History in 2011 hosted by Geneabloggers and designed by Amy Coffin of the WeTree Genealogy Blog. This gave me guided opportunities to dredge my own memories of childhood and growing up and to search out old photos to illustrate the stories. One might expect that people around the world would have very different experiences but I was surprised to find just how similar the life experiences were for fellow bloggers of a similar generation, even in that pre-digital, pre-internet era.
When writing about family stories, the spotlight naturally illuminates the people in the story. Place or location is very often a bit player in the drama. So with the A to Z challenge in 2012 I decided to turn the tables and write about all the places in our family story, some long ago and quite a lot from the current generations.
My husband’s family lived in Papua New Guinea for nearly 25 years and we also lived there after our marriage. Our older children experienced life in PNG but as small children and over time their memories will dim. This was a chance to leave a history of where we had all lived and a little of what life was like there. My husband wrote a couple of guest snapshots for places I hadn’t lived or visited. We’ve also been fortunate enough to visit many of the ancestral places world-wide so I was able to talk about those from personal experience. Only rarely when challenged by a letter of the alphabet did I succumb to using a place I’d only visited as a tourist.
My husband’s family lived in Papua New Guinea for nearly 25 years and we also lived there after our marriage. Our older children experienced life in PNG but as small children and over time their memories will dim. This was a chance to leave a history of where we had all lived and a little of what life was like there. My husband wrote a couple of guest snapshots for places I hadn’t lived or visited. We’ve also been fortunate enough to visit many of the ancestral places world-wide so I was able to talk about those from personal experience. Only rarely when challenged by a letter of the alphabet did I succumb to using a place I’d only visited as a tourist.
In some ways I was breaking the rules, as I was writing with my descendants looking over my shoulder rather than primarily for my contemporaneous readers. Despite this many of my kind readers followed all the way from A to Z and told me how much they enjoyed the travelogue aspects of the challenge.
Since finishing these two biographical challenges I’ve published them together in traditional format with a Blurb blog-to-book which I hope will stay in the family for decades to come. I’ve also got a copy of it in an e-book: a dollar-each-way bet on the survival of traditional vs digital publishing.
My ultimate goal was to leave a trail for our family to follow in the future. Only the passage of time will tell whether I succeeded.
What have you done to preserve your family history? Are there any good research resources that you'd like to recommend?
Be sure to visit Pauleen at her blog Family History across the seas.
What have you done to preserve your family history? Are there any good research resources that you'd like to recommend?
Be sure to visit Pauleen at her blog Family History across the seas.
