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Timelines -- Gather information while you can
By Craig Murray
Tue Feb 13, 2007, 04:11 PM EST
As a true lover of genealogy, he left us with a detailed family story, a rich history of our ancestry complete with charts, historical documents and an extensive collection of family photographs dating back to the mid-1800s.
But with all his organization and research, some questions I never thought to ask will remain forever unanswered, for he is the last of his generation.
He had planned this column to be about tracing your Irish ancestry, and as he grew ever sicker, we considered updating one of his previous columns with some recent contact information, but instead I would like to offer some of his advice on preserving family history.
Record your family history
If you are lucky enough to still have living parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents, sit down with them and ask them to tell you their family stories, and record their recollections. Develop a simple list of open-ended questions and let them talk, uninterrupted. Ask how they met, about their early home life, school days, family meals and celebrations. Ask about their courtship, wedding, divorce and what it was like raising their family. Ask about the day their parents died.
Keep the sessions short — one or two topics — and then come back with another question or two at a later date.
Take family photos. Sometimes we don’t like the way we look. Maybe we’re too fat, too skinny, hair is thinning, pregnant or just delivered. Take them anyway. Take photos on vacation, at the children’s school events and of each other. You may tuck them away now, but the children will love them on your 50th birthday or wedding anniversary. And you’ll cherish the memories, too.
Dig out those old family photographs and ask for help identifying who is in them — then write it down. We have scanned many family photos and then attached caption information directly to the photographic digital file using computer programs such as Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Elements, but attaching a note to the back of the photo works just as well.
Don’t use ballpoint pens or Sharpies to write on the back of the photos, as they can bleed through or crack the emulsion. Instead, lightly write with a No. 2 pencil.
Also try to identify the year of the photo and where it was taken. That will help as you tell your family story.
Create you own family Timeline or family tree
There are numerous computer programs available to help with this, but if you are just getting started, check with your local genealogy group, and they will provide enormous help. Locally, we have a very active South Shore Genealogy Society; our town libraries hold workshops, and local genealogists, like my late father, offer lecture programs on getting started. Genealogy lectures are listed in the newspaper calendar.
Many have memories they would just as soon forget, but local historical societies, libraries and even newspapers love to get images of times past. At my newspaper, one reader left two albums of one soldier’s battle march across Europe during World War II, which included amazing photos of the young soldier at Hitler’s summer home, as well as photos from a concentration camp. This family just wanted to get them out of the house, and dropped them off in the photo department rather than put them out with the trash.
She dropped them on my desk, wouldn’t give me her name and walked out the door. However, after searching them for details and clues, I was able to identify some of the locations and share them with our readers during the 60th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe. But the soldier’s name is forever lost.
The same has been true of old glass negatives showing early factory workers, local scenes and photos of people. Newspapers love them. So do historical societies and many reference librarians.
So if you find yourself cleaning out a loved one’s home, and you don’t want “their old stuff,” bag the photos and donate them.
Gather your family photos, scan them and share prints with other family members. My cousin hoarded a box of family photos that was given to my brother when she passed away last summer.
None of the photos in the box were identified, so my brother scanned the photos at his home in Delaware and e-mailed them to me. I loaded them on my computer, and my dad and I sat down this past fall, on days when his battle with cancer allowed, and worked on identifying the who, when and where of these photos from his early childhood.
I recorded his recollections and captioned the photos. We came across a rather blurry photo of a woman as we searched the files, and my father sat frozen, staring at the screen, squinting trying to take in the blurry detail, then told me the woman in the photo was his grandmother and the photo had been taken at her home in the late 1800s in Ireland. He recalled when he was 12, his father called him to the dining room table, took out the photo and told him that it was a photo of his grandmother and he had just gotten word that she had passed away.
It had been 75 years since he last saw that photograph, but the memories of that day came rushing back, and I was able to capture them on tape. It was priceless.
Some questions will forever remain unanswered
One of the questions I never thought to ask my father was, “Where will I find your obituary?” He had told me numerous times that he was working on his obit, as many newspaper people have been known to do, but that it was not finished. Naturally, it wasn’t finished, because he did not know the date of his death.
After my father passed away, my brothers and I spent a good portion of the day searching his office, looking at every document on his computer hard drive, looking in file cabinets, but the obituary he had written eludes us. However, he left us all the material we need, in his stories and in his family history documentation, to do an obituary that would make him proud. Who knows, his obit may help someone years from now answer a family question as they do their own Timelines search.
