Passing It On

Is your family history disaster-proof?

I own a phonograph record titled “If the Bomb Falls.”

Subtitled “A Recorded Guide to Survival,” the record was produced by the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization in the early 1960s and offered suggestions on how to survive a nuclear attack on the U.S. Those of us who were around in that Cold War era lived with an omnipresent fear that missiles could come raining down at any time.

As you might expect, the narrator on the record speaks in ominous tones. Dig that shelter, stock it properly and cross your fingers. Many Americans did just that. We were all instructed that when the bombs started falling, we’d tune to our Conelrad stations at 640 or 1240 on our AM dials and await further news.

While the record painted a bleak picture of our futures, I was always grateful that they didn’t title it “When the Bomb Falls.”

I thought of the record last week as fires were consuming huge portions of Southern California. Many people fled their homes with little or no advance warning. Some lost everything to the flames; others fared better. I grieve for those whose family heirlooms and mementos were vaporized. I also wonder what I would do if I was faced with a similar situation.

While many of our important family papers and documents are stored in a fireproof safe or in an off-site safety deposit box, many similar items are on display throughout the house. It’s impractical to think we could save much with, say, 5 minutes warning, but we could do better if we had a plan.

What are you doing to safeguard your valuable items in case of a disaster? April Hauck over at doyouQ? has some thoughts on the subject. Becky Wiseman suggests in this Kinexxions post that you might want to work on a “bug out box” if you don’t already have one. You can also go here to check out some excellent tips on how to prepare a family disaster kit.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. If you’d like to know more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Photo: Cover of "If the Bomb Falls" (Tops, 1961)

Halloween and the darker side of family history

Which of these more closely describes your Halloweens as a child:

Trick or treating. Bobbing for apples. Telling ghost stories around a bonfire.

Or, soaping windows. Spinning a black cat by its tail. Overturning porta-potties.

Your answer might very well depend on your audience. Our “G-rated” stories flow freely when we share our experiences with our kids and grandkids while the conversation often spins into “R” territory when comparing notes with our peers.

For many of us, Halloween behavior is something of an aberration, anyway. It’s the one holiday where we’re encouraged to leave our everyday self behind and assume an alternative identity for a few hours. Still, behind the mask and trappings of our alter ego, we remain us at the core. But what about those relatives from our family tree for whom Halloween is like every other day? We often call them black sheep or “the skeletons in our closet.”

Every family has them and every family has a different way of dealing with them. The Yorkshire Post has reported the chances of finding a convicted criminal or secret adoption in your own lineage. “Relative” over at Family Skeletons shows how solid genealogical research can often debunk a family legend that has survived generations. PixelPi on her Motes blog nicely illustrates the mental grappling we exercise when addressing these knots on our family trees.

Personally, I like country singer John Anderson’s take on the subject. This video combines clever visuals with Anderson’s  funny words and catchy tune.

Just for fun. Check out Terry Thornton’s post on Halloween-related names, Janice Brown’s fascinating post about New Hampshire body-snatching and grave-sitters or Jasia’s comments about dressing up the family pooch for the occasion.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. For more information, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of white_shadow_photog.

Don’t let your family library slip away

Perhaps you’ve heard the African saying: “When an elder dies, it’s as if an entire library burns down.”

The saying has it right. Elders are held in high esteem in most cultures, respected for their knowledge, revered for the values and skills that allowed them to reach old age and honored for their wisdom.

But, for some reason, many older people in America are uncomfortable with that position in modern society. My parents have lived through the Great Depression, World War II and everything that I’ve lived through in the decades since. I am truly inspired by their example and am utterly fascinated with the details of their lives before I was born. While they gladly share those details with me, it’s not something they would discuss without some gentle prodding. Many people of their generation are far worse.

Most of my projects these days involve interviewing people of that generation. They’ve all been great … once you get them to sit down and start talking.

One of my subjects, a World War II veteran in his 90s, is like that. His daughter hired me to capture his life story, something he reluctantly agreed to do. The first interview went exceptionally well but when it came time to schedule the second, he balked. The excuses started flowing. They’ve continued for several months. He recently collapsed at dinner and was rushed to the hospital, where he remains. The entire project is very much in doubt. It’s very likely that his descendants will have an abbreviated version of what should be a compelling story.

If you find yourself in a similar situation with a reluctant relative, don’t give up. While they may be resistant at first, they usually open up in time. The reward is so great. You can direct your efforts with another old saying: “A blunt pencil is better than a sharp mind.”

And, to all you Baby Boomers out there: You’ve lived interesting lives, too. Remember the Cold War, rock ‘n’ roll, television, personal computers, Viet Nam, the space race, the Civil Rights movement? They all happened on your watch. The first boomer will become Social Security-eligible in a couple of months. Does that make you an elder?

Just keeping up. I wrote earlier about “dish night” at movie theaters. Jasia at Creative Gene has posted on the subject. … The fires in Southern California seem to be abating a bit, but geneablogger Randy Seaver has been posting eyewitness accounts from his San Diego base.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, check out his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of CharlesFred.

Scaring up some memories of Halloweens past

Leaves are turning colors, there’s a nip in the early morning air, Christmas merchandise is on the shelves. It’s time for Halloween.

Most of us have many family stories and memories built around this scariest of all holidays, usually from our carefree childhood days. While Halloween was always a big day for kids, it’s turned into a big deal for adults, too.

Halloween is a $5 to $8 billion dollar industry in the United States. According to the National Retail Federation, the “average American” will spend $65 to celebrate the holiday. That includes the 33 million of us who plan to visit at least one haunted attraction this season.

Many of us are well into the Halloween spending season. Moviegoers made vampire flick “30 Days of Night” the box office champion last weekend. And we’ve toted countless bags of candy into our homes in anticipation of the hordes of young spooks and goblins that will descend on our doorsteps next week. Some adults have fallen prey to pre-holiday candy binging. Perhaps you can identify with Rose Dyer’s plight.

We had a rule in our family that once you turned 12 years old, your trick or-treating days were over.  Since my birthday is Nov. 3, I was cutting it pretty close as an 11-year-old. Then I got sick on Halloween and couldn’t drag myself out the door for one last sweet blitz of my neighborhood. While that loss has nagged me in the years since, it has offered a lame justification for pre-holiday binging.

One of my first assignments as a young reporter was to write about the dangers of Halloween candy. This was about the time that the media was awash with stories of razor blades tucked into apples, drug-laced cookies and brownies and wholesale tainting of candy. I discovered that these fears were more-or-less urban legends and that prudent parental review of what kids brought into the house generally sufficed. Dodging traffic while weighed down with cumbersome and vision-limiting costumes was far more dangerous, as was overloading young tummies with more sugar than Mother Nature ever intended.

The Des Moines area has a couple of curious Halloween practices that I’d never heard of before landing here over 25 years ago. One is the practice of making youngsters ask a riddle before handing over a treat. As you might expect, you get some pretty awful riddles. The other local oddity is the fact that something called Beggars’ Night has replaced Halloween. It’s always been on Oct. 30 in our years here, leaving Oct. 31 free to parents to have their own wild wingdings. That’s my theory; no one really seems to know how this tradition developed.

So, how do memories of Halloween fit into your life story? Are they suitable for sharing with your own kids and grandkids? This month’s Carnival of Genealogy focused on Halloween stories. Check it out.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Photo: Aaron Lehmer greets trick-or-treaters in Vacaville, Calif.

Food in America today is a far cry from yesterday

Two distantly related news items this week have me thinking about food and how much it has changed in my lifetime.

The first item was about the Iowa Hunger Summit which was part of World Food Prize week. The World Food Prize honors innovations in increasing the world’s food supply. Lunch for some diners at the Iowa Hunger Summit consisted of a soupy corn concoction and a mound of vegetable-flecked rice, a feast for many of Earth’s residents but what amounts to a starvation diet for most amply fed Americans.

The second item was the news that McDonald’s posted the biggest dividend boost in its history in the third quarter of 2007, thanks to surging sales in Asia, the Middle East and Africa. The Gospel of the Big Mac is apparently being gobbled up elsewhere as well with McDonald’s stock reaching an all-time high last month.

The business-side success of the fast food industry has been accompanied by a similar growth in the rate of obesity, particularly childhood obesity, a connection that’s been widely reported. What has been less widely reported, I believe, is the change in family dynamics that has accompanied these trends.

For blue collar families like mine, it was a relatively rare treat for our family to dine out in the pre-fast food years. The first McDonald’s in my home town appeared in my high school years, right next to my high school, in fact. It caught on real fast. Over the years, they’ve added dining areas, drive-throughs and expanded their constantly changing menus.

Other things have happened over the years to change our eating habits. For instance, the Des Moines area now has several Thai, Italian, Mexican, Chinese, Japanese and Indian restaurants. We have restaurants featuring food from El Salvador, Great Britain, Germany, Afghanistan and Greece as well.  We had next to none of that when I was a kid.

Food available in grocery stores these days is a far cry from that available just a few, short decades ago. Eggplant was about as weird as it got back then. Mangos? Avocados? Cilantro? Are you kidding?

The biggest change, though, may be the fact that families get together for a casual meal together far less often than in the past. Dinner was a time for catching up, sharing your day, telling stories, making plans. It’s almost quaint to think of such a thing in these helter-skelter days, as foreign as an eggplant to a city kid in the 1950s.

How has mealtime changed for you in your lifetime? Is that for better or for worse?

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flick photo courtesy of  littleowl.

Personal history lessons learned from missing aviator Fossett

It’s been six weeks since aviator Steve Fossett went missing.

You may remember the story which was all over the news when the 63-year-old adventurer took off in a small plane in northern Nevada on Sept. 3 in search of terrain suitable for an attempt at a world land speed record.

Fossett, who became a millionaire as a Chicago commodities broker, owns several world aviation records. His disappearance sparked a lengthy, intensive air search over 20,000 square miles of rugged terrain. The Civil Air Patrol suspended the official search last week.

Although Fossett and his plane have not been found, three other wrecks were discovered and will be further investigated by the Civil Air Patrol and Nevada Division of Emergency Management. There are a couple of personal history lessons to be learned from the Fossett case.

First, keep an open mind in your family research. You may not find exactly what you start out looking for, but other meaningful discoveries may be made. Although Fossett is still missing, it’s possible that relatives of victims of the other three discovered crashes will finally learn the fate of a long-missing loved one. Remember to share your own serendipitous discoveries with people who may have an interest in them.

Second, deliberate carefully before destroying family historical documents. Nevada investigators had hoped to make use of the “suspended mission files” of failed searches for missing aircraft, but found out that the keeper of the documents, the United States Air Force, created a regulation in 1994 requiring that such documents be destroyed after seven years. Unless any of the discovered planes went missing before October 2000, their records are among the missing, too.

Here’s a link to an early story about the other planes found in the Fossett search. Note that this San Francisco Chronicle story refers to eight missing planes, a number that has since been refined to three.  Here’s what the New York Times wrote about the files purge. Another story of interest is this one from the Orange County Register about a man who leads a team of “wreck hunters.” (A disclaimer: newspapers are notoriously fickle about news story links. These will likely disappear soon. Sorry about that.)

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, check out his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of Ranger Bob.

A little bit about a lot of things

The title of this post is an homage to a former colleague of mine, long-time Des Moines Register sports columnist Maury White. Maury would throw in a bits column about once a week in which he borrowed liberally from his sports columnist brethren around the country with short items he found interesting.

While Maury’s columns were very homespun, some might say corny, and included frequent references to Agro B. Arlo, an acquaintance, My Neighbor Walt, and actress Toby Wing, I’ll stick to a few items that I’ve found interesting lately. (By the way, who were some of your favorite newspaper people that you read while growing up?)

Did you know that Des Moines, Iowa, police officers have to buy their own guns? Lt. Todd Dykstra revealed that tidbit during a presentation I attended Thursday. (Do you have any peace officers in your family history? What stories did they tell?)

One of my favorite personal history bloggers is Terry Thornton. His enticing, well-written blog about life in the hill country of Monroe County, Mississippi, is a good example of southern storytelling. This retired university professor brings family history to life through its stories.

Have you ever wanted to buried in a coffin in the shape of a football shoe? How about in the fetal position in an egg-shaped coffin? Vic Fearn & Co. in England has a line of unusual coffins that you can check out here. Coffins have grown in size in recent years to accommodate the ever-increasing number of obese people in the world. The oversized coffins have created a cottage industry in crematorium refurbishment as older furnaces are not big enough to accept the larger coffins. Read this for an overview of the trend.

How common is your surname? Randy Seaver over at Genea-Musings has an explainer and link to a White Pages search engine that will tell you. It will also tell you the most common names in the U.S. and your state. For example, Smith is the most common surname in the entire U.S. but ranks fourth in California behind Garcia, Hernandez and Lopez.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, check out his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo of Toby Wing by faithxrudd.

Michael Apted’s “49 Up” puts reality back into “reality television”

Thank you Michael Apted. And thank you PBS for bringing Apted’s seminal work in chronicling personal history to American audiences.

This week’s airing of Apted’s “49 Up” also revived the notion that true “reality television” can be riveting watching despite the shameless co-opting, distortion and exploitation of the term by America’s commercial TV panderers.

In case you missed it, PBS this week broadcast the latest in Apted’s long-running series of films chronicling the lives of several people from his native England who entered this world a half century ago. Since 1964, when the youth were 7 years old, Apted has tracked down the participants every seven years and filmed interviews with them, thus the “7 Up” name for the series.

At each juncture, Apted quizzes them about their life at the moment, what’s changed in the last seven years and what do they see in their future. Each resulting film is fascinating, peeling away the life stories of real people in their own words.

The “kids” are 49 now and their personal histories are littered with job loss, splintered relationships and shattered dreams. But there are stories of fulfillment, redemption, hope and promise as well. Some participants drop out for awhile and return. Some drop out and stay out.

In my legacy letter workshops, I attempt a similar exercise, asking participants to write about their best friends at various stages of their lives. Ironically, I use seven year intervals, beginning at age 7. Changes in our family life tend to occur gradually, almost seamlessly, making them difficult to detect. But, if you look at your life in intervals using a reference point outside the family, such as your best friend every seven years, the changes become more noticeable.

Try it. List your best friends at various stages of your life and write everything you remember about them – what you did together, what you learned from each other, what you wanted out of life at that time. You’ll have your own personal “7 Up” series.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of Mary Hockenbery (reddirtrose).

Start raking in those fall memories

 

I had the good fortune to make a presentation Saturday at the annual conference of the Iowa Genealogical Society in Marshalltown, about 60 miles from my home.

As I made the drive on a gorgeous (if a bit warm!) early fall day, I was reminded of the beauty of our state. True, Iowa doesn’t have mountains or oceans, but the rolling countryside nestled between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers has a timeless beauty of its own.

With each change of the seasons, the landscape takes on a distinctively new appearance. For many of us, fall is the best season. Although it’s a bit soon for the foliage to explode into its transitional autumnal overcoat of yellows, oranges, browns and reds, there are other memories many of us associate with the season.

After months of nurturing, it’s time for the land to give up its bounty. Fall harvest is critical for farmers and often means long, dirty days in the fields. For city gardeners, it’s a bittersweet time of savoring the final vine-ripened, home-grown tomatoes while covering delicate perennial beds and returning vines, stalks and leaves to the soil from which they sprouted just a few short months ago.

For many of us, our memory banks are personal highlight reels of baseball and football seasons past. It’s time for the major league baseball playoffs and the college football season is already half over. Hockey season is just beginning, despite early season calamities as we had in Des Moines this week where a game had to be stopped because high humidity created an indoor fog.

It’s a time better spent outdoors, anyway. As Humphrey Bogart said: “A hot dog at the ball park is better than steak at the Ritz.”

What are your favorite fall memories? Put them down on paper and include them in your family history project.

And to Marilyn, Lois, Eileen, Carolyn and the others who attended my presentation in Marshalltown, a big thank you. You were a great audience. Although I didn’t get to catch all of her presentations, keynoter Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak did a great presentation on some of the difficult cases she’s tackled in her duties at ancestry.com. An expert in using DNA in family research, she also spoke on that topic. Check out her blog.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, check out his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo, Fall Colors in Iowa , courtesy of kellyjamesallen.

My, my, how medical care has changed

Kids are popping more prescription drugs these days.

That development, reinforced by a story in this morning’s paper, is not startling, but it did make me reflect on how medical care has changed in my lifetime.

Like most kids growing up, I was more or less oblivious to medical care. If you got sick, you either rested at home and drank plenty of fluids or went to a doctor who more than likely sent you home to rest and drink plenty of fluids. If you got really sick, he might order some medicine for you or give you a shot. If you got really, really sick, you might actually end up in a hospital.

I don’t recall a lot of hand-wringing about the cost of medical care, although it’s possible my parents did have some concerns in that area. I certainly don’t remember the cost of health care driving people into bankruptcy. Nor was there a steady barrage of information in those areas, except for the promise of polio vaccines and fluoridation, both of which were introduced in my childhood.

The generation before mine went through the Great Depression, largely battling disease without even the benefit of antibiotics.

So now comes the report that the rate of prescription drug use among kids to fight stomach aches and heartburn is on the rise. At least part of the increase is blamed on the growing rate of obesity among children in our country.

Given the proliferation of TV advertising for costly prescription drugs for everything from acid reflux to erectile dysfunction, it’s no surprise that our pill-popping culture is continually looking for pharmaceutical solutions to problems that either didn’t exist a generation or two back or weren’t seen as worthy of such drastic intervention.

Remember these changes as you craft your family’s history. Dig out those stories of doctors who actually visited patients in their homes, accepted hogs as payment or who prescribed patience and common sense instead of the latest wonder drug.

Placing your ancestors’ lives in the proper perspective may help you do the same with yours.

Larry Lehmer is a personal historian who helps people preserve their family histories. To learn more, visit his web site or send him an e-mail.

Flickr photo courtesy of Diana Pinto.