Women's Legacy Project

Our Lives Change The World

A to Z of Legacy 2016

The X Y Z of Legacy Tools

A to Z of Legacy 2016

YZ
 
are for axes in graphic depictions as legacy tools.
 
No, really, I am not cheating for the A to Z of Legacy in the A to Z Blogging Challenge.  I could have written three different posts about each axis in a three dimensional graph or cubic structure, but it really makes more sense to discuss them together.
There are conventions in the labeling of graphs and axes.
This is becoming important as individual publishing and printing are both moving into 3 dimensional depictions and products.
My first awareness of this trend was when I was actively involved in a virtual world.

Nancy's avatar, Ana Herzog, on her Island, "The Women's Center," circa 2008, in the virtual world Second Life®.
The avatar of Publisher Nancy Hill, Ana Herzog, on her Island, “The Women’s Center,” circa 2008, in the virtual world Second Life®.

I cannot find my images of the Women’s History Walk that was adjacent to the “place” this image was captured.  Digital storage is not without drawbacks.  But the point is that there was a 3D representation of some major players and events in woman’s history depicted with 3D graphics in which you could walk around displays of, and through rooms filled with images, books, and statues depicting women such as Sojourner Truth and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Shortly after this I learned about 3D printing which some people in the know, such as Jeremy Rifkin refer to as a third industrial revolution.
In the not too distant future, holo-decks and replicators (per Star Trek) will be the stuff of reality.  Spreadsheets will give way to three dimensional, cubic graphs.
 

Typically, the x-axis is thought of as the “left and right” or horizontal axis while the y-axis is thought of as the “up and down” or vertical axis.

If you are used to thinking of fixed geological points on a globe you have used 3D mapping whether you thought of it that way or not.

I do not want to insult the intelligence of the reader, so I included the above descriptions of 3 dimensional mapping.     The following You Tube video goes beyond simple x, y, and z axes but the last portion of the short video does well at explaining 3 dimensions and moving through them in a straight-forward manner.

Most of us will not need to put this information to use in legacy building, but we will need to be able to think about representing things in 3D spaces as books and images take on additional dimensionality.
So far I have been talking about actual replicas of items. But information can also be mapped into non-representational three-dimensional  x y z grids.  For example, number of children, geographic location, and census date could be mapped to show patterns of occurrence.  Axes need not be only length, width, and height.

Veracity – The V of Legacy Tools

A to Z of Legacy 2016

The letter V made from public domain, out-of-copyright "The Language of Flowers for The Women's Legacy Project, Legacy Tools, for the 2016 A to Z Blogging Challenge
 
 
Veracity is another word for honesty.
 
 

Veracity as Policy

Veracity is not only the best policy, in legacy it is the only policy.  One, single fudged reference or date and everything you have ever done is doubted.  This is especially true in historical or genealogical research.11896190_10154182409213242_581279981074806580_o
Collectively the legacy all women are creating right now has to be honest.  As I stated in A Simple Life Truth, a blog post on my personal blog:

Small differences can change everything.  Women honestly recording their lives, just regular old life, and stories and sharing them with the world may be the biggest and best gift every given by women elders to future generations.

THE QUOTE

I ran across a variation of this quote on Pinterest and it was attributed to Shakespeare.  The quote is not by William Shakespeare.  It is by David Viscott from a 1993 publication Finding Your Strength in Difficult Times: A Book of Meditations, as best as I can tell after researching it without having a copy of the book in my grubby ol’ hands.

THE GRAPHIC

I used GIMP (gnu image manipulation program) which is an open source program, much like Photoshop, and that requires no purchase to download, to create this image.
The image of the girl reading is a public domain image from Pixabay.com.  I made the image square so it will look reasonable when posted to Instagram.

THE MEANING

The quote on this image embodies the essence of  The Women’s Legacy Project and I would be honored if this essence helps you in the creation of your legacy project.

Who Constructs the Ws of Legacy Tools

A to Z of Legacy 2016

The letter W made from public domain, out-of-copyright "The Language of Flowers for The Women's Legacy Project, Legacy Tools, for the 2016 A to Z Blogging Challenge
 
 
We recently covered the Who of Legacy Tools as a thinly disguised U for Users.  There are more Ws in the Legacy tool kit.  The classic 5 Ws of inquiry also include what, when, where, and why, in addition to the who.

My Story, Told By Others

No matter what, legacy is largely a story told by others.  The who of legacy is many.
As I said in the earlier article,

If you are truly living life to the fullest and taking advantage of every opportunity that comes your way, you will not have time record your escapades.  And that may be okay if you truly do not care about any other person’s reality after you are gone.  Do what you can to maximize or exemplify what you care about.  Or you may just want to tell amazing stories to your kids, grand kids, or younger people you care about through the grand tradition of oral history.  Tell lots of stories. Let others remember, or retell, them – if they are so moved.

Who

The who of the past is manifold.
Genetics and genealogy provide the packing material for all the “who” about whom you research and tell stories when you do family or community history.  That is the first whom.
The second whom is you in the here and now.  Others may have imagined you in the past.  That is why they recorded their histories in the family Bible or other registry.  And you are the stuff of future genetics and genealogies.
hipster-839803_640Third you is the you that others will imagine when, at some time in the future, your name, something you have written or recorded, or the legend that surrounds your spot in history is invoked.
Who was or will be cannot really be known.
 

What

What is legacy?  You can shape the what of your legacy by determining if you are leaving things such as pictures, furniture, art, books, and the life, or if you are leaving stories.  Or perhaps the what of your legacy is found in full tummies of grandchildren  that are filled with cookies from your recipe collection.  That sense of well-being, or love, may be all you really want or need to create.

When

When will your information be used?  In twenty years?  In 200 years?
When will your book, recording, or video be considered?  In 25 years will it be Grandma’s Book ?  Or in 100 years will it be a chapter compiled at some future point into Early Understanding of the Coming World Shift by an Early 21st Century Women?

Where

Are people talking about your information at a country tea party?  Does a library house your tome?  Is it in a personal library of a descendant?  These are questions that, if answered, may shape the format, media, and presentation of your information.

Why

“Why?” is question that cannot be answered for anyone but yourself.  Of course you may note why you are doing what you are doing in the thing that you are creating.  This will be one of many motivations ascribed to your legacy-making.  Why did she do that?  Those who answer will see motivations for your actions that you may not see.  They may be present in you or not.  All you can do is leave enough context for informed inferences to be made.

Users, The Who Behind The U of Legacy Tools

A to Z of Legacy 2016

The letter U made from public domain, out-of-copyright "The Language of Flowers for The Women's Legacy Project, Legacy Tools, for the 2016 A to Z Blogging Challenge
 
 
Users are the Who of Legacy Tools, but no matter whether you are Living Your Legacy Now so family and friends will have great stories about you, or you are writing or recording personal and family history for posterity, you need to know who your audience is.  But you cannot know the future.  Whether you see this as a conundrum or koan, your perspective will shape what you produce.

My Story, Told By Others

If you are truly living life to the fullest and taking advantage of every opportunity that comes your way, you will not have time record your escapades.  And that may be okay if you truly do not care about any other person’s reality after you are gone.  Do what you can to maximize or exemplify what you care about.  Or you may just want to tell amazing stories to your kids, grand kids, or younger people you care about through the grand tradition of oral history.  Tell lots of stories and let others remember or retell them if they are so moved.

 

It is all about who you think the user will be?

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Can you  be certain?

Personal Legacy

Maybe you have learned lessons and witnessed events that were life-changing or historic in nature.  You want to pass on what you know about these things.
In this case you probably want to consider the type of person for whom you want to pass on these things.  These may or may not be family descendants.  Perhaps you were there at the Battle of Seattle when the WTO met in Seattle, Washington in 1999, and you have untold stories of what happened there that shed new light on how the violence escalated.
With this type of story you will have to determine if you are talking to a politically well-informed person, whether that person has a perspective grounded in left or right-wing politics, or a NW U.S. regional historian.  Different bits of data are apt to emerge when you speak to these different people.  Imagine the person to whom you want to tell the story and imagine telling it to them, even if that person does not yet exist.

Family Legacy

If you are telling a story of your life on the farm, a memoir of life as you grew up that is peppered with family members, you will tell a different story dependent upon whether you are telling it to children or adults.  You will want to ask yourself questions such as:

  • Does the person for who I am crafting this story know what a tractor is?  Or a plow?  Is the difference between a heifer and a bull important to the story?  Has this person likely to have ever been on a farm?
  •  Perhaps you were assaulted in a barn.  If you are creating an account of this event so as to help others in a family or community understand the negative culture that permeated your life and that of your siblings, you will be writing for adults, but you still may want to put in a warning that some scenes might be disturbing for some individuals.
  • Do I need to include images to convey meaning?  Does a blue print or architectural drawing of the pastoral setting of house and out-buildings concisely convey what it would take chapters to describe?

For whom are you creating legacy?  The answer will change the nature of legacy.
 
 

Timeline Templates – T of Legacy Tools

A to Z of Legacy 2016

The letter T made from public domain, out-of-copyright "The Language of Flowers for The Women's Legacy Project, Legacy Tools, for the 2016 A to Z Blogging Challenge
 
Timelines are some of the most under-utilized genuinely useful tools at your disposal.

Linkage

I am rarely a proponent of linear tools, but timelines can be extremely useful.  By turning time into a list, we engage our brains in thinking about sequence.  First this, then that… and that often triggers memories of people, events, and things that are connected to the timeline item and would not likely come to mind without activating that initial link.
charts & timelines created by nancy hill for womenslegacyproject.com

Order of Events

After decades of life, it is sometimes difficult to remember if “the most embarrassing thing in the whole world that could ever happen and that completely devastated your world” happened during your sophomore or junior year of high school.  In retrospect, it is just is not all that important, and details slip away.  You think about other high school memories such as the class trip when you first went to the Art Institute. And then you remember, in a eureka moment, the time with your group of girls friends in the A.I. including the girl who caused the most embarrassing moment.  And your best friend worked in a taco stand between those two events, and dropped a bottle of hot sauce in the lap of girl who caused the embarrassing moment, so you can recreate and order of events and that helps isolate associated dates.

Verification

Sometimes it is tempting to assign a date to something without verifying the date of the event.  Always ask, “How do I know this happened on that date?”  It keeps you honest.  Your great-grandmother could not have met your great-grandfather in a U.S. Air Force Officers Club in London in 1940.  A timeline of world events can help put events into a plausible window of time when a thing could have happened.

Creating Your Timeline

I recommend creating your own overarching timeline with major global, national, regional, state, and local events important to the personal or family history you are documenting.
Timeline for nfh_Page_1There is a nifty, keeno, super-cool individual timeline generator that you can find at Our Timelines.
This online program generates a personalized timeline of events that happened in a particular person’s lifetime.
You just enter a name, birth and death dates (or name, birth and the current year) and a timeline with the age of the person when significant events happened is generated. It can be printed or downloaded. It is free.
Page 1 of my timeline is to the right.
 

The Big 3 of Timelines

In my world view the Big 3 of family history information are made up of one church, one corporation, and one woman.  The element of family history is central to Mormon beliefs so the resources the church has amassed is truly impressive.  Much of the information is online and free to access.  If I could time travel I would go back and invent Ancestry.com as it has made genealogical research accessible and outrageously profitable.  Cyndi is one woman who had a very good idea. She shows just how powerful that combination can be!

Mormon

The LDS Church has a vast amount of family research tools available on the web.  Their video on creating a timeline using Excel® can be found here.  You will have to download Microsoft Silverlight to view it if you are using a Mac OS.

Ancestry.com

Though Ancestry has most resources behind pay-walls, the Learning Center does have some informative articles available. The articles are example heavy and to accomplish some of the neat research shown in the example requires paid membership.  But Ancestry is a company so of course they want to feature the full product.  Do go check out the site’s take on timelines that you will find at: Cheating on History.

Cyndi’s List

Cyndi’s List is one of the best way-finding tools out there.  There is no religious canon directing the site creation and neither is there only a profit motive.  This site grew out of one woman’s manifestation of women’s cooperative essence.  Sharing makes for a better world.  This list of lists that is now twenty years old is well worth exploring.  For this article’s topic, start with her section simply called Timelines.  In the templates section of the timelines page there are links to Cyndi’s own templates in Evernote, links to really informative, simple to understand posts about timelines on individual blogs such as at AnceStories, and even earlier basic, but useful, printable template from an early Rootsweb website to presentations on timeline grids.  Cyndi links to Kathryn Grant’s great 2014, 41 page slide show on cloud-hosted timeline grids.

Recipes – The R of Legacy Tools

A to Z of Legacy 2016

Boxes

Before  their were personal computers, foodies, and food sites sharing every recipe known to humankind, there were recipe boxes and a few treasured cookbooks in every kitchen.
The recipe box I best remember was a dark wooden one. It was mortice and tenon joined box, and the short sides were curved.   My mother treasured it.   It belonged to her mother.  It probably traced to the first decade of the 20th Century when my grandmother married, but it might have been her mother’s before hers.
Most women my age, remember the recipe boxes of their mothers.

Recipe cards

I once collected most of my mother’s recipes to give to my brothers but I diddled around too long and they died before I finished the project.  I should have just photocopied the recipe cards and distributed themhandwritten recipe card from pixabay.
 
 
 
 
The lesson here is do not wait to share what you know, what you have.  Nieces and will appreciate the recipes, but not as much as my brothers would have appreciated them – on many levels.  I do not think we ever forget our mother’s handwriting.

The Food

Recipes are not food,  just as maps are not territories.  Let people know how to provide context for the food you prepare from family recipes.

Farm families, such as my own, did not always have time to whip cream and before the days of electric mixers, it took a strong arm and a bit of time to make the light and fluffy desert topping.  So when making “Grandma’s Strawberry Shortcake,” follow the recipe, but do not add whipped cream to the top.  My family served cream to pour over the top of the short cake and sugared berries.

If you know of such details of how certain foods were served, and on what occasions they were served, include a few brief notes with the recipe.

fresh strawberries in a bowl Strawberry shortcake was always served at the Summer’s birthday gathering that celebrated three of my brother’s birthdays.  Jim, my eldest brother, always requested the strawberry shortcake.  Chocolate upside-down cake was requested by the youngest of my four brothers.  The middle brother with the third birthday always requested German chocolate cake with coconut icing.
All the family would gather for an afternoon of food, sweets, and family stories.  The shade tree in the back yard was the canopy under which we then drank lemonade and coffee.  My family did not drink alcohol.

Family

Much about family dynamics is contained within the context of gathering together for celebration.  Food itself may point to place of origin, but other information is also likely to be embedded in the details surrounding the meal.  Were cards played? Board games?  Did men and women mix after the meal?
In many ways there is nothing sadder than an orphaned recipe.  Document as much as you can.  This captures family culture.   Record as much detail as is comfortable.