For many people, the Christmas and New Year celebrations, where many of us catch up with distant family members, ignite the urge to save their family stories to leave as an enduring legacy for their grandchildren and beyond.Did this cross your mind and is this one of your goals for 2010?

How do you get started?  Where do you begin? How do I break down family barriers?  But I’ve never written more than a shopping list in my life!

1. Let’s start at the very beginning, with your immediate family – your husband, wife or partner, both sets of parents, brothers and sisters and your own children.
2. Note down (a note book will do) all the basic statistics like birth day, time and place, education, employment and where each person lives at present. Allocate a separate page for each person (however don’t be surprised if you end up keeping separate files for the main characters whose lives intertwine with yours).
3. If you intend collating all of the stories, photos and other printed memorabilia, be aware that you will need to digitize these items by scanning them before they can be up-loaded into your family computer. Scanning fragile items such as newspaper cuttings will not damage them, and, once scanned, these items can be easily accessed by other family members.
4. Draw up a timeline (a timetable of your life listing important events in the order in which they occurred) for the various members of your family and then do some background searches of world or national events they may have experienced (World War Two, JFK’s assassination etc). Make a list of questions to ask that person about their understanding of that time, e.g. where were your parents during the first moon landing?
5. Do you or your family have old audio or home movie clips? Again, it is important to have these digitized and uploaded into your computer, where other relatives may share them, resulting in a more comprehensive and multi-faceted story. Don’t forget the family photo albums – pick a few of the  best and  get them scanned -  it’s easy and well worthwhile.
6. What about family heirlooms? They often have poignant or romantic stories behind them which should also be preserved for future generations – Grandpa’s war medals from WWII, Nan’s diamond engagement ring, the old battered sea chest covered with the names of ports all around the world……….

Start gathering all of the memory aids from throughout your family and commence writing, talking or filming the stories that you (and other members of your family) associate with your own unique family.

Once you get started, and realise how many amazing stories are linked to your kith and kin, you will wonder why you didn’t commence this lifetime legacy much earlier.

With the technology we have today it is so much easier too, short stories, quick audio memories, 2-3 minute videos, digital photos – all can be uploaded to you computer and shared with  family.

So it doesn’t matter if all you have written is a shopping list – does it? It’s all about starting and collecting the stories not about writing biographies.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 4:21 pm and is filed under Annie's Heart to Heart. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.