I don’t remember how old I was when I realized my mom seemed to be obsessed with her family history. She was a genealogist besides being a wife and mother of two.
Before she passed away, when I was 48 years old, we’d amassed a pretty interesting collection of pictures, and narratives of our ancestors.
It was only after she’d gone to join them, that my father decided to go through all her papers and he would pull interesting tidbits out for me to see. I had great grandmothers who were poets, a grandfather who was a politician wannabe but never quite made it, a great aunt who was prescient as well as an artist/writer/published composer. Another great aunt died in a turbuculosis asylum and her brother, during some time in his line of duty, was at Dacau, Germany in the vicinity of the concentration camp. Though I’ve not been able to determine his duty stations with the army at that time, it makes sense that he would’ve been used as an interpreter.
So mom used books, records, pictures, all the evidence of the family available at that time. What will we use now? Future tracers of family trees will comb digital files, youtube channels, Facebooks, snap chats and whatever comes next. Does it fall on us to create those footprints for them?
Can you afford to ‘hate’ social media and leave your granddaughters granddaughters wondering who you were?
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