Passing It On

Life lessons from your Great Depression kin

The economic news hasn’t been so good lately. How are you coping? Have you checked your own family’s history?

Most of us have relatives who lived through the years of the Great Depression. Their stories of life in America during that troubling time are often chilling, yet inspirational. They can also be instructive as we navigate the uncharted waters that threaten to swamp our present global economy.

Learning about your own family’s Great Depression experiences gives you a unique perspective on how your ancestors dealt with wave after wave of hardships they encountered as they struggled to keep their families afloat. You can learn more about lessons learned from that time in Studs Terkel’s Hard Times, a book based on interviews of survivors of the Great Depression first published in 1970 and enjoying a resurgence in popularity today.

For many of us, a return to the basics are in order. The Gatsby-like “American Dream” lifestyle of fancy cars, lavish lifestyle and big houses, fueled by cheap energy and easy credit, is unsustainable and, for most of us, unattainable. Here are a few lessons from the Great Depression that can help us get on track:
    • Work hard
    • Save what you can
    • Educate yourself and your children
    • Insist that your representatives in government know where you stand on matters of importance to you
    • Live within your means
    • Be good to your neighbors
    • Support your local businesses

What lessons have you learned from your Great Depression relatives?

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 Koshyk (traveling).

Oxford Project paints vivid picture of town’s residents

The good people of Oxford, Iowa, must have thought Peter Feldstein had lost his marbles..

After all, why would a grown man set up shop in an abandoned storefront in the hamlet of fewer than 700 people and then invite townsfolk to drop in to have their picture taken?

Despite their skepticism, hundreds responded to Feldstein’s invitation, which came in the form of flyers, tacked onto utility poles and passed hand-to-hand throughout the northeast Iowa community.

That was in 1984. Twenty years later, Feldstein did it again. Teaming up with University of Iowa writing instructor and author Stephen G. Bloom, the duo produced a striking exhibit: Feldstein’s before-and-after images flanking Bloom’s brief narrative about each subject.

The exhibit, dubbed the Oxford Project, will be available this fall in book form. The book’s publisher, Welcome Books, describes the book on its web site:

“The portraits reveal the inevitable transformations of aging: wider waistlines, laugh lines, wrinkled skin, eyeglasses, bowed backs. Babies and children have sprouted into young nurses, truck drivers, teachers, rodeo riders, ardent Buddhists, racists, Democrats, strippers, and drug addicts. Time also rewards. Gawky teenagers blossom into assured men and women—the promise of the future realized.”

You can do much the same with you own family photographs by comparing one photo with another taken decades apart. Consider that person’s experiences in the intervening years and how those experiences are reflected in their appearance.

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 courtesy of “The Oxford Project” published by Welcome Books. Photographs © 2008 Peter Feldstein. Text © 2008 Stephen G. Bloom. Preface © 2008 Gerald Stern. www.welcomebooks.com/theoxfordproject

The Great Depression didn’t depress Millie

Anyone who lived through the Great Depression could be excused for having a jaded view of American society. It was a troubling time for many Americans who dealt with natural calamities, economic hardships and visions of a future that were murky at best.

Somehow, though, many of the children and young adults of that era, people in your own family tree, grew up to become what has been described by some as “the greatest generation,” people who rescued the world from fascism and egomaniacal dictators and built the foundation for the world systems that sustain us today.

One of those people made a swing through her native Iowa recently, bring some homespun charm, grace and warmth to a state in the final throes of a nasty, old-fashioned winter. Her name is Mildred Armstrong Kalish, the petite, 5-foot octogenarian author of “Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression.”

You may have heard of the book; the New York Times called it one of the 10 best books of 2007. You may have seen Millie, too; she’s made many TV appearances, including on NBC’s  Today Show. What makes Kalish’s book so remarkable is how unremarkable her stories are. You’ve probably heard similar stories from your own family members who were around at the same time.

But Kalish, a retired English professor who has found her way to Cupertino, Calif., after her childhood near Garrison, Iowa, has a deft storytelling style, engaging readers by transforming the mundane events of her childhood into parables from the Heartland.

If you get a chance to meet her, do it. At the very least, read her book. You will probably come away with a better understanding of what some members of your ancestral tree went through at a critical time in the 20th century.

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

Flickr photo courtesy of pattiedonahue.

Your life story: Short like this

Thinking of writing your memoirs? That’s a pretty tall order, cramming a lifetime into a few hundred pages. Here’s an even tougher assignment: do it in six words.

That’s the length of this sentence. Your whole life in six words.

Smith Magazine and Twitter teamed up for a contest inviting people to accept this challenge and was flooded with 11,000 entries. The result is a book that hit the shelves this week, “Not Quite What I was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.”

Try it yourself. Given enough time, you might come up with something you’re satisfied with, but chances are you’ll need several sequels to your original memoir before you’ve done your life justice.

Here’s what I came up with in my first try: “Should have listened to me more.” This refers to my tendency to weigh all sides of an issue before making a decision. There have been many times when I deferred to the judgments of others rather than following my own instincts, only to regret it.

Check out this nifty video on Amazon for some of the entries that made the cut. Here are a few of them:

Brought it to a boil, often – Mario Batali
Revenge is living well, without you – Joyce Carol Oates
Not a good Christian, but trying – Alexander Tsai
Thought I would have more impact – Kevin Clark
Everyone who loved me is dead – Ellen Fanning
Without me, it is just aweso – Chris Madigan
She kissed me and said yes! – Ricardo Saramago
I managed not to destroy anything – Tucker Frazier

A tip of the hat to my courageous blogging friend Terry Thornton who has gone public with his quest to lose weight, posting his progress weekly, even after loading up on beignets and Cafe au Lait at Café Du Monde during a visit to New Orleans. You’re a brave man, Terry, and an inspiration. Keep it up.

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 Ernest Hemingway's six-word memoir courtesy of k-ideas.

Bookmarks open doors to future and past

We’re all familiar with bookmarks. Bookmarks serve as reminders of where we’ve been and where we want to return to.

Without electronic bookmarks, we’d be adrift in cyberspace, clicking frantically as we try to navigate our way through the often-bewildering web while searching for the path to our intended destinations.

But this post by Shelly Kneupper Tucker points out that bookmarks used in actual books can actually serve a deeper purpose: they serve as markers to our peripheral pasts as well.

As Shelly notes, people use all manner of objects in their bookmarking – recipes, utility bills, love notes, toilet paper, even money. Most of us just grab what’s close at hand and stick it in the book. Others take their bookmarking more seriously.

Perhaps you’ve found strange items in hand-me-down books in your own family. Read the comments on Shelly’s post for further elaborations on readers’ book discoveries. What we find tucked between the pages of a book often provide clues to our family’s past. The same holds true for those hand-written notes in the margins. Check your library today.

Have you ever wondered if anyone alive today has met a person who was born in the 18th century? Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak at Ancestry magazine has. Think about it. The elder person is this equation would have to have been born in 1800 or earlier, 207 years ago. That’s quite a span. To read about Megan’s fascinating search, go here.

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

  Flickr photo courtesy of  PIß.

A tip o' the hat to all Harrys out there

Are you wild about Harry?

Harry Potter, that is. The countdown to the release of the final installment in the wildly successful book series is approaching the zero hour, as virtually anyone with a pulse is aware. I’ve never read a Harry Potter book and have seen just one of the films so I’ve managed to avoid being swept up in this latest round of hyper-hype.

But it did get me wondering: What about the real Harry Potter? I did some checking.

In an unscientific, non-exhaustive search, I learned that there is only one Harry Potter listed in phone directories in Iowa or its contiguous states. In addition to the Harry Potter in Omaha, there’s a Harold Potter right here in Iowa, in Sibley.

Although I have little interest in learning the fate of J.K. Rowling’s fictional Harry (whose life has been bared in some 325 million books so far), I’m more interested in the life stories of the actual Harry Potters. Or Harry Lehmer, my paternal grandfather. That’s just the personal historian in me, I guess. Although there’s always room for a little escapism and fantasy, reality trumps fiction for me just about every time.

What about you: Would you rather read the exploits of a carefully crafted fictional character or the real-life exploits of a person of interest?

Genealogy blogger extraordinaire Randy Seaver offers a reminder that, although the Internet has made genealogical research quick and easy, it is far from complete. To uncover the real gems in your family history project, you’ll likely have to go elsewhere, Randy points out.

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

Flickr photo courtesy of Mom of 5 cuties.