I would like to rise for a point of personal privilege, and urge everyone to write their memoirs, because you are the only one who can.
Computers make this particularly easy, but there are other mediums as well – audio, video, or printed. The memoirs may be Q & A or narrative…and you can mix and match from all of the above.
And it need not just be memoirs. Our family homes include furniture from Jean’s family – which still lives on the farm they founded in 1640! They own and live on 95 acres of the original Mayflower Grant, and Jean has inherited many of the legacy farm pieces. I have also inherited many family heirlooms of some six or seven generation history. Jean and I have never sold a family piece, nor will we – we are the temporary custodians of the pieces and our children have furnished their homes with the overflow.
We have written a single page history of every piece, complete with photographs. The history is in several formats – printed, so a history page can be attached under each piece of the the furniture, on CDs for instant reference by future generations, and bound because I know that formats change.
Our great mistake is not recording on video, or audio, or in written form, the knowledge of our parents…so we have to recall as best we can, and piece together the remaining knowledge of family historians. By the next generation, much more information will be lost.
And yes, I have written many "Incident Reports" which combined will be my memoirs. One of those collections is on-line at
http://www.allenhemphill.com/uss_pueblo.htm .
Although Cds are the current craze, I remember when 8" floppy disks were de rigeur. I am absolutely certain that 50 years from now no one will be able to read data from a current CD, even as no one can read that which was saved on 8" floppy disks. If someone gave you a great collection of music on 8-Track tapes, could you play it?
Only printed and bound memoirs will remain, but for immediate distribution nothing can beat CDs and DVDs. It is probably best to leave your work on many mediums.
But you must start it. Today. My writing on my involvement with the Pueblo Incident has taken more than 20 years, and continues. My work on the family furniture began in 1997, and continues. Both works are updated and republished periodically – but the work continues on the next edition of each, and on my general memoirs.
Yes, it is a lot of work…but only you can do it. Think about what you can do to further the history of your family. In my case, one of Jean’s cousins published a family history ten years ago…beautifully research, and written. On a typewriter! With documents darkly scanned!
Awful!
He had it bound and printed for the immediate family, but it looks terrible. It needs to be desktop published, with all of the original documents photographed for clarity…I will not change a word of his excellent work, but his presentation is terrible. If you have ever read the Histroy of Hidden Meadows by Hazel Early (
http://www.allenhemphill.com/History_of_Hidden%20Meadows.htm ), please imagine what it looked like when I first got it 10 years ago on typed, folded pages! It took months to scan, OCR, and desktop publish the final result -- which I did, and Perry Mills paid for the printed publshing!
Bet you have something you can do to leave your personal and family history in better shape…
