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Genealogy
Have you written your personal history?
Another excerpt from my own history
My maternal grandfather, William Frederick (Fred) Harlow, was born on Buckeye Lake, Licking county, Ohio on 27 June, 1880. Family have told me, and I have personally read some accounts, indicating that his father, William Marshall Harlow was a noted sportsman in the Columbus, Ohio area, and that he made his living by maintaining a hunting and fishing lodge on Buckeye Lake, where he entertained sportsmen from that area, while his wife (my grandfather’s mother), Ella Friddle Harlow, cooked, cleaned and generally maintained the place. Read more
Why Organize Your Family for Genealogy and Family History Purposes
Will you consider organizing your family for genealogy or family history?
Let me give you four good reasons why you should seriously consider organizing your family to help with your genealogy and family history efforts:
1. Your family will draw closer together.
2. Sharing the load makes the work easier and the results better.
3. The lives of family members will be enriched.
4. Genealogy will become even more enjoyable.
Your Family Will Draw Closer Together
As you accomplish the work of researching your ancestors, you will find that there will be greater love and concern among your living relatives as you pull together to identify those who have passed on and learn more about their lives.
In my immediate family, for example, we noticed a real uptick in the “feelings-of-family-closeness meter” as my brothers and sisters and I worked together to research and write the combined histories of our parents and grandparents. The shared experience of completing and publishing our book, Remember Who You Are, increased feelings of unity to a degree we had never felt before.
The same thing happened when we involved eleven relatives of our ancestral family organization in writing the histories of our great-great grandparents and their children. We never had so many relatives come to our family reunion in Idaho as when we wrote and published our research for that event.
Sharing the Load Makes the Work Easier and the Results Better
Much more can be accomplished in a shorter period of time when the load is shared. “Many hands make light work,” the saying goes. We have found it also to be true in genealogy.
In our family’s case of writing our family history, we found that dividing up the writing and research among eight individuals with the support of four others in handling editing, layout, cover design, and funding, meant that each of us had a manageable task to perform. As an added benefit, the quality of the finished product was far superior to what any of us could have accomplished on our own.
Another example occurred in our extended family. Banding together enabled our family to invest several thousands of dollars in professional research we never could have afforded on our own.
The Lives of Family Members Will Be Enriched
“Spreading the blessings” of genealogy and family history to other family members and not “hogging” them all to yourself will enrich their lives. Surely you have noticed the improvement in knowledge, understanding and appreciation when you, yourself, have been involved in producing something worthwhile rather than merely having the output of someone else’s work handed to you. Involve others in the effort. You’ll be doing them a favor!
Genealogy Will Become Even More Enjoyable
Doing genealogy on your own is like eating chocolate cake by yourself. It’s O.K. eating it by yourself, but sharing it with someone else makes it so much better. The same is even truer with genealogy. Having others to share the experience with, both the disappointment as well as the exhilaration, brings an inner peace and satisfaction that is hard to describe to those who haven’t experienced it yet.
As one who has organized the preparation and self-publishing of three family heritage books (one each for immediate, grandparent and ancestral families) let me encourage you to organize your family and involve them in family history and genealogy research. Your family will draw closer together. The work will be easier and the results will be better. The lives of family members will be enriched, and your genealogy efforts will become even more enjoyable. I promise these results will be yours if you do your part.
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How to Organize Your Family for Genealogy and Family History Purposes
Want to learn how to organize your family for genealogy and family history?
There are three levels of family organization:
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Immediate (Parent and Children) Family Organization,
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Grandparent Organization, and
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Ancestral Organization
Ezra Taft Benson taught that each of these three levels has specific responsibilities and that each level should be careful about stepping on the other levels’ toes.
Immediate (Parent and Family) Organization
The main responsibilities of the Immediate Family organization are to:
- Have a family council comprised of all members of the family unit.
- Teach basic responsibilities of the family organization to the children.
- Learn how to make decisions and act upon those decisions.
- Teach work ethics and self-preparedness.
Grandparent Organization
In contrast to the Immediate Family organization, the Grandparent organization should be responsible for:
The time have come to organize your personal history
Getting started is always the toughest part. Lots of procedural questions may come to your mind. How should I organize it? What has happened in my life which will be of interest to others? Is it going to be one big yawn? Where do start? I’ve never written anything before. Can I do it? What do I include and what do I leave out?
What if something you write inspires just one person to live a better life?
Just as an example here is the way I organized mine.
I wanted to let my children and grandchildren know something of my immediate ancestors, so they would know the stock from which I came – and from which they came. So my first sections were about my father’s parents, my mother’s parents, then my own father and mother – in the years of their lives before I came along. I’ve given you a few excerpts from this narrative in sketches below. Maybe I am wrong, but I think it is fascinating to learn about their struggles, success, failures – and to marvel at the strength of their characters.
I spent all my growing up years in a small town in Indiana. So it was logical to have these sections:
My first years on earth. The High Street years. The Columbia Street years. The Division Street years/. The Walnut street years.
Then when I left home: Hanover College years. The Army years. Michigan years. First Salt Lake City years. Massachusetts years, etc.
My history, through the first years of my marriage, covered about 100 pages, which I segmented as above.
I didn’t share any of it with family until that whole narrative was finished. I see now that was a mistake. I should have sent it to my children and grandchildren in installments. They would have been more likely to have received it, digested it, and maybe even asked for more! As it was, they got the whole dose at once, and I wonder how many have really read the whole thing.
So one approach is simply a chronological narrative of events, broken down by the geographical locations of your life. That is probably the most frequent way biographies are written. That’s the approach I used, after giving the background information about my parents and grandparents.
Another approach would be to organize by subject. Some of these might include schooling, illnesses, tragedies, successes, world events that affected your life, marriage, divorce, deaths, career choices, romances. athletic achievements. What have I left out? But you get the idea. This approach may be very interesting and certainly lends itself to installment transmissions.
The most important thing is to get started. Good luck.
Preserving and sharing memories
The “here and now” is so dominant in our daily existence, it is almost preposterous to think that any considerations other than those relating to getting over today’s hurdles, could become important to our youth.