Passing It On

Other people’s stories can help you remember yours

We graduated another class of memoir writers last week at the Urbandale Senior Center. As usual, the instructor learned as much from the students as they did from him. Congratulations to Revanne, Bette, Mary Jane, Thelma, Jo, Ernie, Lucia, Ron, Sally, Frances and Nina.

It was a typical class consisting of widows, retired nurses, teachers, a therapist, a descendant from slaves and an Iowa farm girl or two. Writing skills ranged from one student who hated to write to a former journalist who loved to write. Some had started a family history, others didn’t know where to begin. They all shared one common trait, though – each wanted to leave a written record of family history for future generations.

By the time we reached the end of the four-week course, each was well on the path to realizing their goal.

The formal portion of the class helps students set up a structure that allows them to probe their memories, collect their stories in an orderly fashion and writing them into a coherent narrative. But it’s the informal readings of their work that really pulls it all together. As one student reads, the others are busy taking notes to themselves.

“As I hear the others read their stories, I’m reminded of something I need to put in my own story,” one class member explained. Several students commented that the class created an avalanche of memories, many they hadn’t thought of in years. It’s a testament to the immense library of information we all carry with us.

Since a few would-be students were turned away (there’s a limit of 12 students) because the September class filled so quickly, we’re offering another four-week session of Introduction to Memoir Writing at the Urbandale, Iowa, Senior Center at 1-2:30 p.m. beginning on Thursday, Oct. 15 and running for four straight weeks. Cost is $40. Call 515-278-3907 to register.

Writing prompt of the day: Share a story from your life with another person who is part of the story and ask for their version of the same story. What did you learn from their version?

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

Flickr photo courtesy of sflovestory.

Five We Like: Another week of family history goodies

There’s a lot of good family history information available on the Internet. Here are five places we’ve enjoyed visiting this week:

A proper hanging. Gregg Mattocks was just looking for information and a photo of a likely 19th century ancestor. What he found instead was a gripping tale involving murder and a hanging in pioneer Oregon.

Where in the hell is Matt? According to YouTube, nearly 24 million of you have already seen this toe-tapping video, but here it is for those of you who have yet to get their happy feet activated by Matt’s antics. For you Iowans, here’s an Iowa adaptation by Jeff Hoskinson. Both are great fun.

7 Years of Marital Bliss. My nephew Jason and his wife Rebecca have been married for seven years now or, as Becky says, “we have officially arrived at perfection.” I especially enjoyed reading about one of the couple’s interesting traditions – Jason’s annual “State of the Marriage” address.

Visiting Birchtown: Where did everyone go? At one time, Birchtown, Nova Scotia, was the biggest free black community in North America. Today it’s all but disappeared. What happened to the town and all its people?

Booooorrrrriiiinnnnnggggg???? Some people might consider a photograph of someone doing the mundane things of life to be boring. Others prefer those photos to the organized, planned shots of people saying cheese into the lens. You can put Beth Conant (and me) solidly in the mundane camp.

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

Flickr photo courtesy of g-hat.

Do you know the true stories of your family artifacts?

Of all the items in my home that have been passed down through the generations, I don’t know of any that would spark a controversy.

Probably the closest would be a handful of German coins from World War II that my father-in-law gave to my son. I don’t recall how they came to be in my father-in-law’s possession for sure, but I seem to recall something involving a dead soldier. My wife thinks we may have also inherited a 78 rpm record by Two Black Crows, a pair of white vaudeville-era comics who performed in blackface with exaggerated black dialects. I don’t think we have the record, though.

These are relatively tame examples, but family artifacts sometimes create an environment that can cloud or distort a family’s history. I was reminded of this by an article on BBC news that raises the question: Is it OK to collect Nazi memorabilia? Are collectors of Nazi war memorabilia fascists?

In a family history context, I would also ask: Does an artifact define its owner?

In my youth, statues of black jockeys were seen on some lawns and Little Black Sambo was a story often told to small children. Is it fair to call collectors of such items today racists? By the same token, is it fair to brand collectors of beer cans alcoholics? Or are collectors of memorabilia from the Confederate States of America secessionists or slaveowner sympathizers?

The answer is, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, probably not.

It’s only natural that in our quest to learn as much as possible about our ancestors that we make some assumptions about them based on sparse evidence. As far as making inferences strictly from the items that have survived them, though, some caution should be exercised.

Writing prompt for the day: What do you know about the artifacts that you have received from previous generations? Are you sure about that?

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

Flickr photo courtesy of Benimoto.

Simon says do you remember these games?

When I entered kindergarten, I had a hankering for the great outdoors. Therefore, when the teacher turned us loose on the playground for recess, I hightailed it for the wide open spaces, namely my home a few blocks away.

Following a parental bribe of a Hopalong Cassidy gun and holster set, I abandoned my wandering ways and soon learned the delights of playground time. During my elementary school years I remember two playground breaks each day – one for recess and one for physical education. Most of the time I couldn’t tell one from the other.

Playground time was game time for me. Kick ball was a particular favorite, but there were others, too. My friends and I played games before school, after school and on weekends, too. A game of tag or hide and seek often extended well past dusk in those days.

Once our parents tossed us out the door, we were on our own to entertain ourselves and we generally were successful.

I have little contact with elementary school age kids these days but my perception is that many of them lead much more structured lives than we did. Many kids today start organized sports as soon as their little legs can carry them onto a playing field.

I don’t know if schools offer recess anymore, or P.E., for that matter, and I wonder how many kids today would enjoy a simple game of tag or keep away. How many of the following childhood games do you remember?

• Annie Annie over
• Blind man’s bluff
• Dodge ball
• Four square
• Hide & seek
• Hide the button
• Hopscotch
• Hot potato
• Jacks
• Jump rope
• Keep away
• Kick ball
• King of the hill
• Leap frog
• Marbles
• Mother may I?
• Red light, green light
• Simon says
• Spin the bottle
• Stickball

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

Flickr photo courtesy of Robert S. Donovan.

Five We Like: Another week of family history goodies

There’s a lot of good family history information available on the Internet. Here are five places we’ve enjoyed visiting this week:

Famous Five: Choose Your Eventualities. While raising the question “What would you like to be famous for?” this post also shows that what you want may not matter in the end. Check out the reader comments, too.

Wiffle balls, hapless tulips, growing up. This essay by a videographer friend, Steve Pender, in the Arizona Daily Star about fun in the streets and fussy neighbors brought back plenty of memories from my own youth.

A Magical Experience – Cleaning the Attic. Anyone who’s helped a loved one move from a home after decades of residency knows the bittersweet experience of sorting through mementoes accumulated over a lifetime, or more. Mary Emma Allen shares some of what she discovered in the farmhouse she grew up in.

Cemetery Clearing. Taneya Koonce extended her family vacation to Talladega, Alabama, by a few days this summer to take care of a VIP – Very Important Project – namely clearing brush from the graves of family members. Thanks to Randy Seaver for leading me to Taneya’s post.

Preserving Kinship. Judith Hale Everett never met her husband’s grandmother, but she’d heard many stories about her. Now, thanks to Grandma’s prolific canning skills, the two women have forged a bond that transcends generations.

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

Flickr photo courtesy of doug88888.

That’s not the way I remember it, Johnny

I’ve written before about how few of us know when our time on earth will end. That uncertainty alone is reason enough for us to take immediate steps to preserve our personal legacies for future generations.

But I often draw a chuckle or two from my students when I offer another reason for getting their stories down in black and white as soon as possible: If you’re the first person in your family to document an event, your version then becomes the story of record for future generations.

Think about that for a moment. I’ll bet you have different versions of some story floating around in your own family. You would expect that, given that no two people witness an event in precisely the same way. But the variations sometimes are remarkably different.

I’m a strong advocate for accuracy so I suggest that you check out a story as well as you can before passing it on. Be prepared for challenges to your own memory. Stories become more entrenched in our memories with each telling. That doesn’t make them more accurate. Once you’re satisfied, put it in writing. Seeing a story in print usually makes it more credible in the eyes of a reader.

Wouldn’t you prefer that story to be your version?

Writing tip of the day: Identify the stories in your family that vary according to the storyteller and determine the “real story.”

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

Flickr photo courtesy of 'Playingwithbrushes'.

Find those stories that put fruit on your family tree

How much do you know about your own ancestors? Most of us would probably answer “not enough.”

That’s why we research our family’s history, to fill in some of those gaps in our knowledge, for to better understand our ancestors is to better understand why we are the way we are. That’s why we dig beyond the dates, names and places of our genealogical research in search of the fruit on our family trees – their stories.

For example, here are 10 questions about your grandparents that you won’t find answered in any census, public or church record:

1. How did your grandparents meet?
2. What was grandpa’s first job?
3. Who was grandma’s favorite teacher?
4. Did they go on a honeymoon?
5. Who were their greatest influences?
6. What was their first year of marriage like?
7. What values do you share with them?
8. What do you remember about them?
9. Which grandparent do you most resemble?
10. What were their greatest achievements?

How many can you answer?

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

Flickr photo courtesy of yeowatzup.

Five We Like: Another week of family history goodies

There’s a lot of good family history information available on the Internet. Here are five places we’ve enjoyed visiting this week:

Kerouac of the Canyonlands. Everett Ruess was a free-spirited writer and painter who left his California home at the age of 17 in 1931 to wander through the forbidding deserts of the southwestern United States. Before disappearing in 1934, Ruess had swapped prints with Ansel Adams and began building the legend that would eventually lead to comparisons with Jack Kerouac and Billy the Kid. But the myth of Everett Ruess that grew for 75 years was recently laid to rest.

Items from Parker Museum sell at auction. For most of his life, Mylo Preheim worked as a barber or sold television sets and stereos. But Preheim also indulged his passion for local history, gobbling up artifacts and antiques, many of which ended up in the museum he ran in Parker, S.D., for the past 50 years. But Preheim, who is now in a nursing home, recently sold off his collection.

Belle Costa Da Greene : ‘Girl Librarian’. Belle Costa Da Greene was an enigmatic figure for all of her 71 years. The product of a mixed marriage, she claimed to be of Portuguese descent. A strict non-believer in personal history, she burned all of her personal papers shortly before her death. But her lover of 40 years kept his letters from her and they form the basis for her biography, An Illuminated Life : Belle Costa Da Greene’s Journey From Prejudice to Privilege.

Saving the Family Bible. Genealogical superstar Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak has written another tale of orphan heirlooms, detailing her search for a proper home for a 150-year-old family bible.

I like [good] pies – a personal history. Robert H. Moore II has a passion for pies and this mouth-watering essay explains why. Warning to fellow pie lovers: Don’t read this when hungry.

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

Flickr photo courtesy of terren in Virginia.

From the vault: Photographic memories of my family’s past

This picture from the 1920s shows my mother, Elsie, playing with her parents, Jens C. and Ellen H. Andersen, in the 1920s. I believe the photo was taken at the house they rented at 2303 Avenue D in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

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

Photo posted to Flickr by lwlehmer.  (Walter B. Lehmer collection)

Want good answers? Ask good questions

Interviewing people is a mostly linear exercise. We ask a question, note the response and move on to another question, usually in a chronological order.

This is perfectly acceptable so long as the interviewer is paying close attention to the responses. Tucked away in the answer, often betrayed by a nervous pause or shift in the subject’s body language, is a hint that a more substantive answer lies elsewhere. It is up to the interviewer to deviate from the script and probe in a new direction.

The biggest drawback with the linear interview process, I think, is that it teaches the subject to respond in a linear fashion. This allows them to anticipate the next question and to formulate a response even before it is asked. In some ways, this is a good thing since it places the subject in a certain place at a certain time, creating a scenario that lets the mind roam a familiar landscape.

But without some gentle probing, you really only get what’s on the surface, those rote stories that have been repeated countless times over the years, at least mentally. To dig deeper you must ask more analytical questions, forcing subjects to stop momentarily and dig around in their memory bank before responding.

For example, you might ask someone: When did you peak? The ebb and flow of our lives includes those memorable times when everything is clicking just right. Athletes refer to these times as being “in the zone” – baseball hitters see the ball as big as a grapefruit and basketball players see the basket as big as Lake Erie.

Some physically precocious kids see their athletic careers peak in grade school. Similarly, many wallflowers in high school are simply late bloomers.

What makes this a good question is that we don’t normally think of our lives in those terms. We have to stop and think about it. The question opens the door for some thoughtful follow ups: Why did you pick that time? What made it so special for you? What happened after – did you try to get it back or did you just accept it and move on?

Bottom line: You have to ask good questions if you expect good answers.

Writing prompt for the day: Write about a peak time in your life.

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

Flickr photo courtesy of kevinzhengli.