To Gather

To gather allows you to lump, group, and move together. You may gather like or unlike items or actions. 

Do you gather eggs, or skirts, clans, or your thoughts?  What have you gathered in the past?

The word gather has a more gentle sound than the word group.

Think of what you gather, how you gather, and what motivates you to gather.  Are you one to wool-gather?

The hummingbird gathers spider silk to bind her nest together. Birds and small furry mammals gather together nuts and seeds to cache for times when food is scarce.

Gathering at Clan and Family Reunions

Clans gather together. But really any extended family gathering fits the definition. Have you attended such an event? If you have then you should write about it. Nearly all such events are lost to the past.

The example I am sharing comes from the early 1960s when my father and mother and I would drive past the place where my family homesteaded in the 1840s. All that remains is the lake names after the family. We would drive on for a few more miles and arrive at a small town of maybe as many as 900 people.

Then we gathered at a community center my great aunts, my father’s aunts and many of the descendants of my great-great-grandfather, John M. Hill, a civil war veteran of the Union Army. We would have a pitch-in, potluck meal showcasing everyone’s best recipes. After the food was finished coffee was served and reserved and family history was discussed, geneologies gone over. I was one of the only children there, as my parents were in their 40s when I was born in the late 1950s. Nearly all my cousins were born in the 1940s, and a few in the 1930s.

From me to my second great grandfather (was about 130 years).

• John (1830-1900)
  • Silas (1871–1949)
    • Ellis 1893–1974)
      • Donald (1915-1986)
        • Nancy (1957-living))

There were at least four people I talked to at these early 1960s reunions / gatherings who were children when John, the civil war veteran, was still alive. To me John was just these people’s Grandpa. The stories I have of him were told by people who knew him.

If you can remember your great grandparents or talking to family members who were 80 years older than you when you were a kid, write down any stories they told you.

Our analyses of whole-genome data reveal an average generation time of 26.9 years across the past 250,000 years, with fathers consistently older (30.7 years) than mothers (23.2 years).  — from Pub Med.

Note to self: “Does this mean that women are evolving faster than men?”

Not Only Family

Fewer and fewer people have access to this range of personal experiences and range of ages in people they know and have known. People are getting married, overall, later than they once did, and having children later. I only know a couple people who were grandparents by age 40. It was once common. Capture what you can.

Perhaps I am wrong, but I don’t think most people my age were able to collect stories from this many generations spanning so many decades/centuries.

My daughter was fortunate enough to have a close relationship with our neighbor who we moved next to when she was less than a year old. The neighbor lived to be 105. She was born in 1904. So my daughter has an appreciation of the 20th Century in a way that few Millennials have. She has purchased a home built in 1927, a dining set from the 1950s, and the flowers and garden components of the yard they are creating, reminds me of my grandmother’s garden. The things she is gathering around herself are not typical of her generation. I hope that if she has children of her own she will document stories of people these things remind her of; that if she enchants neighborhood children that she will tell stories she gathered from people who were over two to three generations older than her.

Gathering and Collecting What is Meaningful

If you can’t capture stories directly from several generations you might want to collect things related to the times when they lived. While you won’t find caches of their seeds and nuts, you might find a mason jar filled with buttons, or memorabilia from the 1933 World’s Fair that your grandparents attended.

Or perhaps you just want to gather things that have personal meaning to you. Label them and attach a copy the story behind why you gather or collect these items to the collection.