Families are filled with inspiring people who live lives that contain lessons and motivation for future generations. But many kids today don’t know much about their great-grandparents, much less their great-greats. This post shares ideas on how you can preserve your family history — not just basic genealogy, but also the personal histories of the individuals in your family.
Recording “The Dash”
Our lives are a collection of stories of the different things that happen throughout our lifetime. As Linda Ellis says in her poem, The Dash, “Your life is made of two dates and a dash. Make the most of the dash.”
A person isn’t simply a date of birth and date of death. They live lives filled with meaning, experiencing important events like graduation, marriage, creative pursuits, and having children. They are a combination of character qualities, the truths they hold to be important, and the learnings that they internalize and that set the foundation for their life. Recording and sharing this information is valuable for future generations.
6 Ways to Preserve Your Family History
We generally think of older generations when we consider preserving family history, but you have the opportunity to preserve the stories of your own life as well. It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day, but taking a step back to record meaningful moments through pictures, audio recordings, and videos can make all the difference to your kids and future generations. Here are six ways to preserve family history.
1. Create a family history kit.
Consider the important events in your family member’s life and the items that have memories associated with them. You can collect these memories and photos of these items in a family history kit. This kit could include your son’s straight-A report card, your father’s military service medal, your husband’s retirement party card, grandma’s chicken soup recipe, and your college diploma. Also, include the stories from those events that you hold close to your heart. This kit may become a time capsule of sorts for your life and all of the things that have had meaning in it.
2. Film family stories.
When your family is gathered together for the holidays, it’s a great time to pull out the video camera or your phone and film the stories that matter to them. Make it a tradition! Each family member can share highlights of something meaningful that happened during the past year and why the events shared are important to them.
3. Preserve family heirlooms.
Do you have a medal from your father’s service in the war? Or maybe you have a dish that your grandmother brought from the old country. These things are important to preserve along with their associated stories. Make sure the items you keep have identification, including who owned them and why they mattered. These items were passed down for a reason and that reason is important to capture. You can use Thingealogy to record the stories of family heirlooms and organize those stories along with their associated items.
4. Record home movies.
The clunky films of our youth have been replaced with digitized equipment, and even our phones can take a solid home movie. Film the moments that matter to you and your family — capture that silly dance your son does as an infant learning to walk, and the tears shed when your grandbaby is born.
5. Create a video documentary.
Take your home movies and photos and create a video documentary with clips and slide shows. Stitch together the stories of your family member’s life. You can organize events by importance, by chronology, or some other creative method. This documentary can be kept and viewed throughout the generations.
6. Organize your photo album.
You may have a big box of pictures or a collection of digital photos stored in Dropbox or on your phone. Printed photos can be digitized and added to an online photo album. Digital photos can be sorted through and curated. Gather meaningful photos and share the stories behind each photo. Thingealogy makes it easy to pull this together. Using Thingealogy, you can organize photos into collections and, using your smartphone, record yourself and your loved ones speaking about the pictures.
Using these six ideas, you can capture the stories that will inspire future generations. Your family will cherish these stories for years to come.
Thingealogy® is a free story-telling app that helps you organize and preserve your loved one’s stories. Download the app, and try it out for yourself!
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