The “hard work” of family history

My paternal grandmother died when I was about fifteen or so, and my paternal grandfather had moderate Alzheimer’s at the time. With her death (she was the primary caregiver) a small army of relatives led by their six children and their families descended in a frenzy for the memorial service, to clean out and organize their home and possessions, and to prepare to transport my grandfather back to California to be cared for by my father’s oldest brother (he’s a surgeon).

About a dozen boxes of papers, albums, photographs and books ended up underneath my parents house where they have remained unopened and basically forgotten for the last twenty some years. That is, by everyone but me.

I went over yesterday to dig out several boxes of baby clothes etc. that we have kept for my brother’s new baby, and I decided to finally take a look in a couple and see if there was anything remotely interesting. I was delighted to find my great-grandmother’s photo album containing numerous pictures taken in London (my grandmother was born in London in 1905) as well as numerous scrapbooks and old pictures.

I called my father today (he hadn’t been home when I was rooting around in their crawl space) and told him that I wanted him to go through some of them with me. So this evening we spent five hours going through half a dozen boxes and we were both surprised and pleased to find a treasure trove of old letters, newspaper clippings, obituaries, birth and funeral notices, photos, diplomas, family scrapbooks and the general personal debris that a couple collects in eight plus decades upon the earth.

We found dozens of items going back into the early 1920’s and a variety of things that were even earlier than that. We also found significant and herebefore unknown information on my great-grandparents as well as a great amount of mementos and personal affects from my father’s childhood as well as his five siblings.

All in all it was a productive and enjoyable evening. As the family historian I have upon occasion taken the initiative to record family stories and label pictures that otherwise would become forgotten or gone unlabeled. Before my maternal grandparents passed on, I spent many hours pulling out boxes of pictures and went through them one by one, asking who they were and writing on the back of them as we went along. I also discovered that there was invariably a short story that went along with each of them. It was a great window into the pre-modern era as well as their early lives.

If I had not done that, much would have been lost to not only myself, but my children and my brother’s children as well, not to mention the generations that will follow us. Recording the past for those in the future can be a thankless and time consuming task, but one that can also be rewarding and important. I now own those boxes of pictures that I took the time to identify and understand, and I took the same step tonight with my father’s side of the family to help record, catalogue and label what we could before that knowledge becomes lost or forgotten.

We made it through about half of what he has, and I look forward to seeing what the other half has to offer us. It is like a treasure hunt into your family history as we have absolutely no idea what they have to offer us in knowledge, memories and generations long gone looking out at us from the past.

If you’ve managed to read this much of the post you might be interested in reading The Family Historian that I wrote a few years ago.

…Every family has a rich and varied history. Of triumph and tragedy. Its own heroes and villains. But we are a part of that. The final product of those who came before us. As a pallbearer this summer for my grandmother I helped carry her casket across what had once been her father’s fields to its final resting place just a few hundred yards from where she was born. I was surrounded by the graves of relatives who had gone on before and dozens of their descendants so often scattered and near-strangers but brought together for an event such as that. There was a shared camaraderie though of family, and the ghosts, dreams and aspirations of those who exist only in a few faded photos and in old stories from long ago…