Family

Be Your Family Historian

Gather your family stories before they disappear

My father built this train set for me in our attic

I recently published Reconstructing My Paternal Grandfather. It was quite an effort to pull together as much as it did, and I was left wishing that I could have done more.

If you google “family historian,” most of what comes back will be related to genealogy. Sometimes real biographies are part of genealogy, but most of it is like the beginning of the Bible: someone begat that one, and that one begat the other and so on.

I don’t care who begat whom. I want to know the stories, what these people did, who they were. So little of that survives.

There are reasons. When we are young, we are thinking about our future, not the past. Even if we are wise enough to know that we can learn valuable things from history, we tend to focus on the more universal stories, the wars, the rulers, the political movements. Our own families are not usually part of those histories.

There is also an understandable reluctance to tell the stories that reflect poorly on our ancestors. My grandfather abandoned his family and took a new wife. He left a twenty-year-old daughter with no way to complete her college degree. A hero stepped in to marry her and support the family, but my grandfather was still the villain…