A huge hurt builds inside me. My father died on Christmas Day 1986. It is a familiar, old hurt. This year it is freshly layered with new hurts and loss. Five months ago the my last living brother died. He was the eldest of my siblings. 13 months ago my brother who was closest to me in age died. Two other brothers have passed on, one in 1998, and another in 2005. Mom died in 2007.
I have a husband, and a wonderful daughter who I will see shortly after the New Year when she and her finance return from the great white north to the Old Pueblo to plan a wedding that will happen the day after next Christmas. I have an amazing and talented step-daughter. We spent a fantastic Thanksgiving with her and her husband and their twin five year olds a few weeks ago in the Hudson Valley.
The last two brothers to pass both had dementia so I hadn’t really been able to converse with them for a while. I am not yet 60. My mother lived to be 92. I could live for a long time as the only one who remembers my childhood family holidays. Childhood memories of fall and winter get togethers become cloudy through time. There is no one left to shine sunlight through the clouds on old stories, desserts, family jokes, no one to laugh with about family eccentricities. I can tell the stories to my children and grandchild, and I do, but there is now no one who shares those memories with me.
I know I’m not the only one.
Holidays can be very, very tough. Be kind. Ask people how they are doing. Smile. Give hugs. Take it easy, don’t do more than you want to or can can do. Allow yourself a good cry, don’t cut it short. Then dust yourself off and do something to make someone else happy. Find an activity that brings you cheer. Allow the cheer of others to creep into you. We can learn to have a sadness and to be happy at the same time. Life is bittersweet for those blessed with long lives.
Merry Christmas, or happy whatever you may celebrate!
Last Minute Legacy Gifts
There has recently been a flurry of new products related to capturing social media posts, digitizing images and letters, as well as platforms for capturing audio stories. This was discussed in an earlier WLP post.
But which one do you choose as a gift in the short week before Christmas? Turn around time is the limiting factor. What can you still accomplish in such a short time?
Several options are still viable as gifts.
Ancestry.com Gift Subscription
Ancestry.com is the best known commercial genealogical records service. It offers subscriptions that are easy to give. The person to whom you are giving must have an email address and you need to provide a start date for the subscription.
What Ancestry calls a U.S. Discovery gift allows access to all U.S. records:
12 months $169
6 months $89
What Ancestry calls a World Explorer gift allows access to U.S. and international records:
Legacy Box Gift Package
17 Ways to Capture Legacy Stories Now
Capturing stories
There are wonderful companies out there who help you record a short interview with a grandparent or elder member of your family. Have one made, you will be glad you did.
There are ways to do this yourself. In this age of selfies, and self-produced video, though, there are wonderful, fairly easy, and straight-forward ways to capture moments with and stories of people you cherish.
The big holiday season is underway with Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other end of the year celebrations and observances. Take advantage of the opportunity that is people you love gathering together.
Professional Options
- Hire a videographer. How much did you spend on your wedding video? Capturing your grandmother and aunts talking about significant events that they shared may be even more important down the line to you than your wedding day.
- Hire a photographer. Professional candid and staged photos in a home have a warmth that studio photos are extremely hard pressed to capture.
Keep Everyone Busy
- Enlist the assistance of other individuals to capture these moments. Have a way set up before the event, so you can tell people where to find the results, to share what you all have captured.
- Have a tech savvy teen take several good selfies with every person at the event.
- Have the same tech savvy teen also capture portrait shots of every person there.
- Set up a camera with video capabilities in a spot with good overall vantage to capture a meal or after-meal story-telling and have it record the meal or time period.
- Set up phones or recorders in several spots to record audio.
- If there is a budding journalist or writer in the family, enlist that person to interview individuals about a specific topic.
- Help less experienced information gatherers by providing one topic about which you would like for them to have a conversation with each person.
- You might also ask “the interviewer” to come away with one thing from each conversation which they found more interesting or surprising.
Capture Audio
Most phones have the ability to record audio. Most electronic phones and tablets have had apps created for them which also allow you to record and even edit. Let people know you are recording to capture family stories and then leave a phone or tablet in various places where people will sit and tell stories. Most people will forget that they are being recorded or warm up to the idea within a short time.
- Do not promise transcriptions of the recording. Transcription is a skill that is time consuming and can be quite difficult and frustrating.
- Save and bundle the recordings together transferring them off of the devices on which they were made. Do this immediately after the event.
- Jot down times and time stamps when especially good stories or important were shared so you can easily find and work with particular bits of audio.
Share Digitally
- Put all the data, photos, recordings, etc on a thumb drive, memory stick, or flash drive.
- Give one drive to each family or person as a gift.
Share Print Versions
Every other community business seems to have digital print services that include creating books from your images. If you give digital versions, individuals can make their own print copies, of course, but it is a nice touch to provide print versions to elders that may not be able navigate the ins and outs of contemporary technologies.
Many social media platforms also allow you to gather and print posts in book formats.
Hire a Personal Historian
Personal historians provide slightly different services The individual can collect information from family members at the gathering, curate information you have shared, and determine how to follow up with individuals to gather more and missing information.
Community Resources
Consider contacting schools and programs with instructors and leaders who might encourage students or participants to contact your family members for interviews.
- Anthropology, history, and other social science classes often encourage such projects. So do scouting and youth groups. This is especially good if you hear a story from a relative that you feel should be explored in more depth than you are comfortable pursuing.
- National organizations, such as Story Corps, also facilitates and records personal histories and interviews. And there is a Story Corps APP you can download so you can add your stories to the world database of personal wisdom.
Collaborate Online
A website or even a Facebook Group (probably with secret or closed membership) can be set up before or after your gathering for sharing family information.
The best sharing happens when clear guidelines are set up and shared before the group or site becomes active.
- Define the type of content to be shared.
- What is appropriate to share? Photos, genealogical information, family stories? Facts only? Opinions welcome?
- Is the information shared on the site to stay on the site or may things be copied and shared elsewhere?
Outlining basic guidelines for participation will help to prevent misunderstanding that are almost certain to pop up when families come together online.
There are as many ways to collect family and community legacy stories as there are individuals doing it.
If you do this, we would love to hear how it went, what you found out, and what you suggest for others wanting to curate their own legacy projects.
Violence as Tantrum
More senseless violence: Paris, Colorado Springs, San Bernardino. I live in Tucson and know victims of “our” mass shooting. I respond to incidents of violence personally and viscerally.
What’s a woman to do?
Plenty.
Women can collectively and actively change everything.
The Women’s Legacy Project is not a political site. But women’s very essence is political in that politics at the highest level is simply one of the ways society organizes itself. I’m not going to discuss stratification and power as if those concepts are real things. They are processes and subject to constant change.
Governance of populations and places happens. Politics is one of the ways in which it happens.
Women may not be well represented in current political systems because those systems were developed and maintained by men. Women and men do things differently. But as humans reorganize ourselves into a single interactive society with global instantaneous communication systems we can expect turbulence as all our various systems mix, blend, and recombine in new ways.
Ultimately this site is intended to present information about women’s information systems, about how we do things over the short and long haul.
The official editorial stand on cultural violence is that violence is equivalent to a tantrum by an out of control child. It would be terribly ignorant to allow a child to harm him or her self or others.
I wonder what might happen if all the women in the world decided to respond to violence and ideologies that employ violence from this maternal perspective?
Travel Amid The Fearful
This past week of Thanksgiving and multi-legged travel across the country to see grandchildren during heightened fear and security levels was enlightening for me in so many ways. Not the least of these ways was that 5 year old twin girls with Thanksgiving birthdays are wonderful bundles of joy and non-stop energies of all sorts.
Other darker understanding also dawned on me. I consciously refuse to allow fear to shape my life. I have control over how I choose to respond to life and cultural events. I have control over how I shape my reality. Not everyone, in fact most people, do not understand the power they have to shape how they feel about and see the world. Collectively this ability can transform interaction, processes and ultimately the world.
I recognized fear in those around me as I traveled. Fear in airline passengers, fear in crowds, people with distrust of authority who embrace irrational solutions. I am calling this fear out as manufactured paranoia. So much goes on in our lives at this time of year, that stress alone makes it challenging to navigate the Holidays in the best of times, but when the larger world adds to the stress, things begin to break.
The good news is that women, as always, have the power to shape the information and reaction to that information that comes into their homes. When we do not actively engage in understanding and processing information, we allow it to wash over us, to be delivered to us as a finished product rather than as a bits and pieces of data that have to be assembled.
Big media news adheres to policy and structure of news delivery and analysis that convey a distinct view, a style of delivery that is a branded viewpoint. That view is presented as though it is objective. One of the few things of which I am sure is that nothing is objective.
Who says we have to buy things in stores on a Friday, or shop locally on a Saturday, or order things online on a Monday, or “give back” on a Tuesday? Companies who are selling things and the media that carry their advertising and messages are the only ones I can think of who promote these things. I shop locally all year long. I do purchase from major online retailers who can get things to me quickly when necessary. I try to give and give back all the time.
To me the day after Thanksgiving is a day to play games, take walks, construct models, and put together puzzles, I try to buy nothing on that day and just be with the family with whom I am sharing the holiday.
I will not allow fear to manipulate my healthcare choices or travel decisions. I am sad. I will spend as much time as I can with family. I will maintain my informational autonomy as best I can.