We were
out to dinner with our friends Patti and Pat the other night and Patti shared
with me that she’s taking a writing class at her church. I’ve never known that
Patti had an interest in writing, so I was fascinated to know that this is a
class in lifestory writing – a topic that’s been very much on my mind lately. I
also discussed it with a friend who works at the Jewish Home for the Aging in
Los Angeles, suggesting they offer a class for the folks who live there. As
people age, we mustn’t lose their stories. We must find a way to record and
save their stories for future generations. I would love to teach the class
should the Jewish Home decide to offer it.
Writing
life stories has become all the rage. We’re in the so-called Memoir Revolution
with volumes written about how to write your life story or memoir and how to
produce it into a book. One in particular is Sharon M. Lippincott’s The
Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing: How to Transform Memoires into Meaningful
Stories.
I’ve been
journaling for years, and I wrote and had a memoir published, Leaving
the Hall Light On: A Mother’s Memoir of Living with Her Son’s Bipolar Disorder
and Surviving His Suicide (Dream of
Things, 2012). But, I’m thankful
to say, a long time before I even started to tell my story, my husband Bob began
his over thirty-year journey to write down our family history. I thought I’d
share what motivated him to spend so much time on this project and how he
managed to get the information that went into it.
Madeline and Bob at the California Science Museum
It all
started because he loved hearing my uncle telling stories about his family’s
escape to Russia from Lithuania during World War I. Pretty soon Bob began
writing these stories down with pen on paper. Later on he taped Uncle Dave and
my mother who had encyclopedic memories about their life in Eastern Europe and
their eventual immigration to the United States with their mother and other four
siblings.
Soon
he realized how many people in both our families had gray hair, reminding him
that they wouldn’t be around much longer. So he decided that if he didn’t get
them to tell him their stories soon they would eventually be lost. He also used
Ancestry.com to gather data related to the families’ journeys to America, he hired
a genealogist to help him get facts about his father’s family in Blackburn
England, and he traveled to Lubeck Germany where he found meticulous birth and
baptismal certifications for his mother’s parents.
Luckily
some members of my family – my mother, my mother’s uncle and cousin, and my
aunt on my father’s side – also wrote their stories down. Bob used these typed
documents and a multitude of photos from both his and my families to flesh out
the researched material. His father told a lot of stories about living in New
England in the early 20th Century.
Bob spent
the first twenty years collecting data in between working full time as a
program manager in the aerospace business. And then for the next ten years or
so he stopped working on the history all together. By that time most of the
older generation – his best resources – had died, and he had to find others in
the family who could fill in some blanks. My one surviving aunt and my cousin
did a lot of that work – although my cousin insisted that Bob edit out the
material about his father’s and our family’s mental illness. Bob’s cousin also helped him identify many
family members depicted on a photo taken in 1928. But because it took so long
to write and produce into two volumes – one for his family and one for mine –
Bob was bitterly disappointed that both our brother’s died before they had a
chance to read it. He feels he shouldn’t have sacrificed timeliness for
accuracy. He is also disappointed that so many of the extended family members
didn’t really care to read it at all.
Bob felt
writing a family history was well worth it although in a sense he did it for
himself. He needed to record the old people’s stories before they died.
And he was successful in doing that. He became the family’s historian and is
widely recognized for his accomplishment. He also believes he has left a legacy
for those younger than us. Otherwise how will they know where they came from?
Although Bob stopped the
histories just at the point of our marriage in May 1970, he wants to
write a third volume to record the events since then. He also churns about what
to do with all the family photographs – the hordes that came from my mother and
uncles and his cousin. Fortunately our own family photos have been organized
and digitized. The rest need to be as well. That is another daunting job that will help complete the legacy he will leave to our family’s younger
generation.
His advice to those who want to take on the job of writing a family history: “Start
interviewing the elders in the family as soon as you can because they will
start disappearing. They are your first-hand sources for your life story.”
My advice
is to start writing your own life stories now. Take a class as my friend Patti is
doing, grab Sharon’s book to get some great prompts and examples, or just sit down and write. Your children and their children
will be glad you did.
(portions
of this article were originally published at PsychAlive.
