Search:

Five Easy Ways to Start Your Family History Project

I will never forget the afternoon my Great Aunt Mildred read my Great, Great Grandfather’s autobiography to us out loud. The story was only two pages long, and written in long-hand, front and back. It seemed so brief to capture an entire life but it was 100% more than I had from any of my other great, great, grandparents!

One of the stories J.C. Atkinson told was of helping his brother’s family move by covered wagon from Wisconsin to the Nebraska Territory. He drove the extra wagon, helped them build a sod house, and then turned around and walked home. WALKED HOME! By himself across the unbroken prairie! He angled his way across the Nebraska and Kansas until he got to the Missouri River. He worked his way downstream on a river boat and then got hired to work on another boat going back up the Mississippi. He said he got back home to Wisconsin “with 50 cents in my pocket and a terrible fit of ague.” I have so often wished I could ask him what he saw as a young man on that walking and working tour across the United States in the mid 1800s!

I also wonder why my other great great grandparents didn’t leave us even a single line of text about their lives but it is probably the same reason so many of us don’t think to leave a legacy for our families and future generations.
• We’re busy living our lives.
• We may think that only the stories of famous people are worth saving.
• We don’t know where to start.

Let me share with you five good starting points. All of them can be done using the “How do you eat an elephant? – One bite at a time” strategy; meaning you can do a little at a time and still get a lot done. By the time you’ve worked on just one section, you will probably be bitten by the family history bug (I was!) and cruise right into writing a personal history for your family. Here are five things to do first.

1. Organize Your Photographs

Many people have pictures, including ancestral pictures all over the house. Albums here. Shoeboxes and cigar boxes there.
• Step number one is to get all your photographs in one place.
• Step number two is to go through the pictures, a batch at a time, and write on the back of each who is in the picture, when the picture was taken, and what is happening in the picture. You may not know all these things, capture as many as you can.
• Here is another, perhaps easier, method. My mother had a half dozen albums from her childhood. I numbered all the pictures and then sat beside her with my digital recorder as she talked about each picture. I learned so much! And I captured many family stories, prompted by my mother’s seeing the pictures, in both in my mother’s voice and in transcription. There is a CD and transcription in the front of every album now. This project was easy and fun!
• The last thing you might want to do is scan all family pictures into the computer and share them with the rest of the family. Too often in the past, pictures were divided up between members of a family resulting in no one having a complete photographic record. Degenerating pictures can often be saved and restored using something like Photoshop. Once your pictures are digitized and shared, you can start agitating for the rest of the family to send you copies of the photographs they have.

2. Heirlooms, Memorabilia and Treasures

The problem with Great Aunt Net’s footstool, Grandma Groeger’s treadle sewing machine, and my father’s antique scientific scales is that they are never going to fold up flat so they can be included in a personal history book. 3D heirlooms need to be documented. Documenting the treasures in your family is another activity that can be done one item at a time. I purchased a copy of “Our Family Heirlooms and Their Stores” by Patsy Kuentz to help document heirlooms in my family but you can also create your own way of documenting.
One easy way to start is to just walk around the house with a little notebook and write about each heirloom: who owned it, how old is it, where is it currently stored, and any stories there may be behind it. Take a digital picture of each item and attach it to the page. Include on your list all the information of historic and monetary value but also remember to include things that no one but members of your family would include as treasures: the pillow cases Grandma Atkinson hand-embroidered, the crock used to make pickles during the Great Depression, the Christmas tree ornaments made by the kids in the family in the 1950s, the myrtle wood bowl purchased on the family trip to Colorado in 1925.
When you get ready to write your personal history you can include pictures of these heirlooms, memorabilia and treasures as “sidebars” or “text boxes” for example weaving in the picture of Great Aunt Net’s footstool when she shows up in the story.

3. Written Material

Look around and see what paper records you have in your family. You may have your Great, Great Grandmother’s naturalization papers framed on the wall or a diary she kept as crossed the ocean from Europe to America. My father has a record of every purchase he made from the time he was first married in 1948 to today. (Okay, my Dad is a little bit obsessive compulsive, but in a nice way!) At first glance one might think “Who cares that we bought an Easter dress for my little sister in 1957, at Hertzfelds, and it cost $12.35?” but these small details begin to paint a picture of family life and the times they lived in.
Start by looking for newspaper announcements on births, weddings, anniversaries, special events, and deaths. Check the family bible for memorial or Holy cards. Also ask the older members of your family if they have saved any letters, journals, or diaries. My aunt saved and then returned all the letters my father wrote to her when he was in the army during WWII. Perhaps your mother is keeping her love letters from your Dad. I had no idea that the autobiography of my Great, Great Grandfather, JC Atkinson, existed until I was interviewing my grandmother on her life story and Great Aunt Mildred “remembered” she had “grandpa’s letter about his life.”
If you want to go a step further, you can search census and other records for bits and pieces of family history. Personally, I am longing to make a trip to Pawnee City and Humphrey (the tiny towns in Nebraska where my parents grew up in) to search the newspaper archives for interesting articles about several generations of my family and their various businesses.

4. Make a List of Chapters

My first family history project was a Family History Cookbook. It started inadvertently because one morning in early December I decided I couldn’t live another day without my grandmother’s recipe for Christmas caramels. It took me about 15 minutes to locate it. I just called my Dad and he had the recipe but I didn’t anticipate that he would then tell me the whole story about my grandmother as a candy maker, how sugar was about all they had in abundance for Christmas presents during the Depression, and how everyone in town wanted Grandma Amy to make them Divinity at Christmas. Gradually the book grew to include recipes for typical holiday dinners down the generations as well as creating a chronicle of what the Farm Generation ate, what the Wonder Bread Generation typically ate, and how my family is eating today. Once I got started, I knew I wanted recipes from my grandmothers, my own family as I was growing up, and I even wrote a chapter about C-Rations and things my father was fed as a soldier on the front lines in World War II. (Shocking! I said to my Dad, “What they fed you doesn’t look all that nutritious.” He replied, “They were feeding people they didn’t expect would live very long.” Yikes!)
Your book doesn’t have to be specialized like a Family History Cookbook. You can include anything you know or find out, but it is fun to start by making a list of chapters for your family history before you start writing.

5. Other Sources

Once you know what you want to write about, identify who is the “keeper of that information” in your family. Perhaps there is more than one person. I got lots of information about growing up on the farm from both my Dad and his brother. Great Aunt Mildred had the only copy of JC Atkinson’s autobiography. My cousin Lisa has my Grandma Groeger’s cookbook with all her handwritten notes. I heard that one of my great grandmothers’ made great dipped chocolates before there was even refrigeration; turns out one of my Dad’s cousins still had the recipe. She also told me some stories about my Dad as a child and their grandparents that I would never have heard otherwise. The more sources you have for your family history, the more windows you have on the past. It was fun for me talking to all these elderly cousins and Aunts and I might never have gotten to know them otherwise.
Make a list of everyone in your family (including neighbors and friends of the family) who might be coaxed into telling you fascinating stories about your family. It helps if you share your chapters list to get them started or come with a list of questions.

Closing:

Again, individually, these projects do not take much time or effort if you work on them a little bit at a time. You start out asking your mother a single question: ‘Who are the people in this picture?’ and sooner or later you end up with a family treasure of your own; a personal and written record of your family’s life. Good luck and good hunting!

Article Source: http://www.familyhistoryarticles.com

Dhyan Atkinson is a Consultant, Business Skills Trainer, and the Family Historian for her family. Although she works with all kinds of small business owners, she specializes in helping people start their own personal history business. Over the past 5 years, she has helped over 200 personal historians learn the skills they need to find clients. Dhyan can be reached at Dhyan@SatisfactionByDesign.com or on her website at SatisfactionByDesign.com

Please Rate this Article

# of Ratings = 2 | Rating = 5/5