Passing It On

Sure, life is tough, but what about Grandpa's?

 

You hear a lot about the complexities of modern life, about how kids today are under much greater pressures than their parents faced because of the rapid evolution of technology, the constant changes brought about by a global economy, the uncertainty of a deteriorating environment and the threat of terrorism.

But, while there's plenty to be concerned about, I'm not so certain that the threats facing my children are any worse than those uncertainties faced by my own grandparents when they left their native Denmark for an uncertain future in the United States in 1920.

My grandfather, a journeyman cabinetmaker on the island of Aero, left his picturesque home with his young bride to spend the better part of three weeks in the belly of a large transport ship, alternately ingesting and vomiting bowls of cabbage soup en route on an uncertain American odyssey that began at Ellis Island.

After making his way by train to Iowa, he looked for work in a land where he didn't know the language. Although he had the good sense to relocate near a sister who had preceded him in migrating to the United States, he was forced to take janitorial work in his early years.

Rural Iowa at that time had no electricity, much of the plowing was still done with horses, there was no indoor plumbing in his home, there was no Social Security, no retirement plan, you couldn't legally buy liquor, there were no commercial radio stations in the entire country, penicillin and antibiotics had not been discovered yet, the average life expectancy was around 50 years and the future of baseball was very much in doubt with the indictment of several major leaguers in what would be known as the Black Sox scandal.

But somehow my grandparents came through all that to raise five great kids, including my mother. And, though other family members may know otherwise, I never knew my grandparents to complain about the life hand they were dealt.

For their perseverance and resilience, I am profoundly grateful. I'm certain their story is more or less typical of the millions of immigrants who landed in America around the same time.

As you work on your family history projects, remember to honor properly those who have paved the way for your own achievements through their life's journey.

  Flickr photo courtesy of  dok1.

What was your neighborhood like?

 

When I was a kid attending elementary school, I walked about five blocks to school. It was close enough that I could actually come home for lunch, eat a bowl of soup and a  sandwich and still make it back in time for the afternoon bell.

On those rare days when I carried a sack lunch, my mother would always give me a dime to buy some fruit and a dessert. Although I usually stopped at the Ideal Grocery, just two blocks from school, I had plenty of options. There were at least a half-dozen mom-and-pop stores within a half mile of our house.

Typical of that 1950s era, the store itself would usually be just a big room with a weathered wooden or linoleum floor, a few shelves bearing canned goods, a counter with a second- (or third-) hand cash register on it and rows of candy behind it. The owners usually lived in the same building.

My friends and I spent lots of time in those stores, guzzling soda during breaks from our all-day pickup baseball games, tearing open the latest series of baseball cards or nibbling on 3¢ Klein bars.

Growing up, that six-block radius was pretty much my everyday world.  Not only did we know our neighbors, I'll bet we knew every neighbor within two blocks in every direction.

We knew whose yard it was safe to pluck a peach from. We knew who wouldn't give us back our ball if it went in their yard. We knew about the crazy lady without kids who would snatch you up if you ventured too near her door. Well, we thought we knew.

They knew us, too. I was frequently surprised by their comments or  questions. How did she know that? Obviously, there was an adult network in place that I didn't understand.

But the neighborhood was important to me, providing support and comfort in so many ways. As you construct your own personal history don't forget where you grew up. Revisit your time there mentally and incorporate your memories into your project.

Think, too, about your present situation. Do you know your neighbors? Are you OK with that?

Here are a couple of posts by others on neighborhoods. This post from Solano County in Northern California is about the nationwide trend to fashion new neighborhoods in the image of the old neighborhoods of my youth. This post takes on the philosophical question of "What is home?" and has the added bonus of some information about southern cooking. Warning: Your mouth may be watering after visiting this site.

  Flickr photo of an old neighborhood courtesy of  selkie30.

Saving the family tree, literally

 

The idea came like a thunderbolt.

It came to Matthew Basan, a third-generation furniture maker from Toronto, after a severe thunderstorm brought down several of his community's centuries-old oak trees.

Determined not to let the downed trees "meet a fruitless end as firewood," Matthew came up with a better plan, taking a tree with a past and giving it a future, as furniture. He calls the work "the final fruit of the family tree."

His father had planted the seeds for the project when he made a bureau for Matthew as a gift. If the furniture had come from a tree with sentimental value, Matthew reasons, it would have been perfect.

Although Matthew had already decided on a career in furniture design and construction and was planning to open his own shop, his family tree plan changed everything.

Jay Brown, Matthew's partner in their new Sound Design shop at 400 Queen Street East in Toronto, said that Matthew  "realized this was an extraordinary opportunity, exponentially more meaningful than his previous plan, and life altering for himself, as he knew how much more gratifying his life’s work would now become."

Here's what they do, straight from their blog: "We take the one living record of your family's shared life, the family tree, and reveal the beauty beneath as we transform it into a number of beautiful, handcrafted pieces, together forming your family's collection - homegrown, thoughtfully processed, handmade furniture."

So, here they are, two young guys with a dream for the future with reverence for the past, with a new shop in the heart of Corktown, the oldest (and currently being revitalized) district in "The City of Trees."

They promise to post their thoughts on inadequate tree removal statutes, the planting and harvesting of trees, identifying trees by GPS and other environmentally and socially responsible tree-related issues

It's entrepreneurs like Matt and Jay that help connect generations in a positive way.

Flickr photo of fallen oak courtesy of there's a b.

Jottings from the world of personal history

 

Ethical wills have been much in the news lately.

For those unfamiliar with the term, an ethical will is a specific form of legacy letter in which a person passes on hopes and beliefs in much the same way that a legal will passes on material goods. An ethical will is a non-legal document.

Of all the people killed in the terrorist attacks of 9/11, it is estimated that less than a third of them had a legal will. Even fewer had ethical wills. While the financial details of a person's estate can be sorted out after that person's death, their hopes and beliefs are gone forever without an ethical will.

These newspapers have carried articles on ethical wills recently: Philadelphia Inquirer, Orange County Register (reprinted in the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel), the Chicago Tribune and Montgomery Advertiser. (Caution: Newspaper links are notoriously fickle; these may not work by the time you read this.)

Nice job, Kathleen. Lots of people try their hand at writing for the Internet. Some are good writers; most are not. It's a particular joy when you find a site that's a delight to read. Kathleen Bell has just such a site. She writes a lot about her family - past and present - and she does it with such style and grace that you feel as if you've been invited to a chat in an old friend's home. I'm sure she won't mind if you drop in.

He said it. "If we want our stories to be known, we need to do it ourselves. We can't wait for other people to do it for us." - Wilbur Howard, founder of Lansing (Mich.) Area African-American Genealogical Society.

Just for fun. Click on over to www.anagramsite.com and plug in a few family names to come up with some interesting combinations to spring on folks at your next family gathering. (Example: Actor Tom Cruise comes out "So I'm cuter). How about you?

Flickr photo courtesy of BugMan50.

Some quirky ways to be remembered

While most of us are content to pass on our legacies in the form of an ethical will, legacy letter, personal history book or some sort of audio or visual medium, for others that's not enough.

You may recall the family squabble that developed a few years back when baseball great Ted Williams died, leaving instructions to have his body frozen by a Scottsdale, Ariz., cryonics firm, presumably to be brought back to life when science finds a means for doing so. After writer Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide in 2005, his cremated remains were mixed with gunpowder and stuffed into fireworks for a colorful celebration at his Colorado ranch.

Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards claimed recently to have mixed his father's ashes with cocaine before snorting it (he later said it was just a joke). And the ashes of Star Trek actor James Doohan, Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper and some 200 others were to be launched into space this month.

Back on earth, John Stevenson, a retired aerospace engineer in Gold Canyon, Ariz., has developed a Graveside Memory Capsule. This weather-protected capsule, inconspicuously mounted at a grave site, contains a digital history of the departed, accessible by anyone with a laptop and USB cable.

It's becoming increasingly common for human remains to be preserved in other materials, such as ceramics. British product designer Nadine Jarvis has taken it a bit farther. She can take the ashes of a person and transform the carbon into 240 small pencils, "a lifetime supply of pencils for those left behind."

If you'd rather put your carbon to a more elegant use, you can contact the folks at LifeGem. They'll take your ashes, purify them, heat them and press them. After about 24 weeks, your descendants will have a diamond suitable for mounting.

There are other ways to keep your memory alive. There's a neat list of 10 of them at Cabinet of Wonders.

Cemeteries: Where history lives

 

"Once More Around the Crypt"

That was the headline on a story I wrote in my sportswriting days about a high school track team which, since it didn't have an all-weather track at the school, did its early spring training in a couple of nearby cemeteries.

I found it ironic that young, healthy athletes would prepare their bodies for grueling athletic competitions by winding their way through the final resting places of many of their community's founders and civic leaders. Cemeteries truly are fascinating places.

When I was doing research for my book on the last tour of singers Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens, I used cemetery records to track down the family of one of the long-lost musicians from that tour.

As I prepared to visit Holly's grave in Lubbock, Texas, I was told that fans often showed reverence for their fallen hero by leaving guitar picks stuck in the ground surrounding his modest grave marker. What I found instead were shards of broken beer bottles, which I had to carefully remove before shooting a photo of the site. Such is the nature of many celebrity graves.

For most of us, cemeteries are more than tributes to our personal pasts. They offer an enduring record of our collective histories as well.

It's possible to do some cemetery research online, but many of us prefer to stand on the ground of our ancestors. If a personal visit is in your future, here are a few tips from genealogist Annita Zalenski of Totowa, N.J.:

• Make your visit in the afternoon. Many cemetery staffers are busy with funerals in the morning.

• Bring a spray bottle to help you see fading inscriptions on tombstones.

• Bring garden clippers to remove overgrown weeds.

For more tips on how to do cemetery research, go here.

Flickr photo courtesy of RL Johnson.

Of cruising, holidays, grandpas...and more

People have long spent vacations in family pursuits - visiting relatives, taking in sites important in their family histories or doing research in such genealogical hotbeds as Salt Lake City or Fort Wayne, Ind.

One area that's been growing in popularity is genealogy cruises. RootsMagic Inc. - producer of popular personal history programs RootsMagic, Personal Historian and Family Atlas - has scheduled a Nov. 11-18 Caribbean genealogy cruise.

Besides stopping in the Bahamas, St. Thomas and St. Maarten after starting in Florida, many of the nation's top genealogy experts will make presentations during the cruise portion of the trip aboard Royal Caribbean's Mariner of the Seas ship. Details can be found here.

Is that Santa I hear? Thinking about the holidays yet? If you're thinking of presenting a loved one with the gift of a family history product in December, it's not too early to start planning. Personal historians tend to get quite busy after Labor Day, so it's better to get started today than to be disappointed later. If you need some help in putting together such a project, drop me an e-mail and I'll be happy to give you some suggestions.

Put Google to work for you. You can now take advantage of Google's book-scanning project of millions of books in the public domain and others made available by rights holders. World Vital Records has teamed with Google to offer text searches of millions of books from around the world.

He said it: “A story is like a star. It is born in the past, illuminates the present and will shine in the future.” – J.R. Carroll.

Just for fun...take a spin over to Jennifer's blog and follow the link to an entertaining remake of Lonzo & Oscar's convoluted musical tale of twisted genealogy, "I'm My Own Grandpa."

Flickr photo of Mariner of the Seas courtesy of  Haole Punk.

The voices that shaped our lives deserve saving

Oral history is hot.

People everywhere are getting the message about recording their family stories. Whether on audiotape, videotape or digital media, there's nothing that compares with hearing a family story told by a family member.

Although my primary business is putting together a written record of a family history, oral history is an integral part of the process. Much of a written record is based on recorded interviews which become part of the overall project.

I've recently teamed up with a videographer to offer a comprehensive personal history package. Our collaboration makes possible the best of both disciplines.

The written record provides an in-depth narrative record of the family's history that, besides providing interesting reading material, serves as a primary reference book. The accompanying 20- to 30-minute professional video captures the highlights of the written work visually, told by many of the book's "main characters."

National Public Radio carries excerpts from its StoryCorps project every Friday on its Morning Edition program. The StoryCorps project features two mobile recording studios that travel the country, recording the stories of everyday America. The stories are testaments to the power of the spoken word. Some are available at the StoryCorps web site.

But StoryCorps is not the only oral history project around. There are many. Check them out. Perhaps you'll find an interview with a long-lost relative. At the very least, you'll come away with some ideas on how to incorporate oral history into your own family history project.

Flickr photo of StoryCorps studio courtesy of  Laura, KCUR.