I was on Twitter today. I saw a tweet by geneabloggers concerning a writing prompt for family historians to participate in self-writing. What a fantastic idea! The project is going on for the next 15 months. A series of writing prompts will be listed on the geneabloggers site, allowing family historians to participate writing about themselves. 

Self-writing/ recording/ documenting has long been a concern for me. It is something that I am interested in, but I also feel kind of weird about. What do I really want to say about myself? I feel a lot like I haven't really done anything. I'm young. I'm not married. I don't have children yet...but I don't' give myself enough credit - and I don't think that a lot of people give themselves enough credit. I know I have had awesome adventures - traveling and with school. That's something to write about. I've received awards. That's something to write about. It's all about perspective! Finding the perspective can be a little tricky though! 

Think about this: I was visiting with one of my best friends the other day, and the discussion about audio recordings came up (as it so often does). She said to me that she acknowledges a weak spot in our own research - we spend a lot of time recording and interviewing older family members. What about the perspectives and experiences of our other family members? 

This got me thinking - what she said was absolutely true. Everyone has a life story, and sometimes you don't get to live it out in nine decades or ten decades. There are people that I have lost in my life that I wish I had thought to ask them questions or record their laughter. So, don't just consider older family members! Think about younger family members too. Think about yourself. 

I am going to start a project with the younger people in my family. I want to do a series of recordings. I've been thinking about doing this for a long time too. A few years ago, when I first started this site, I began to do a series of self-interviews. I asked myself the same questions that I would ask another family member. And then I deleted them and tried never to think of them again - they sounded so dorky. I couldn't believe that I sounded the way that I sounded when I tried to answer questions. And I became so distracted by the way that I could see myself in the camera that I didn't want to do the interview anymore - which made me sympathize COMPLETELY with older family members that I have recorded on video.

 So, now I'm going to change my approach. I'm going to have my set questions. I am going to interview myself and the younger people in my family. But here is the twist: ideally, these recordings could range - they could happen every ten years, every five years, every three years, or every year. They would document the challenges and joys that the individual has experienced. 

Talking about themselves can be a challenge for some people and some topics might be pretty sensitive - so take that into consideration. Try to capture stories, as well as facts. It has been my experience that people LOVE telling stories, but providing the specifics about where they were born isn't necessarily that much fun. 

It is a project that I am going to implement in my own life. Now, audio recordings, video recordings, or written word - that's up to you. 

I was on Twitter the other day and saw link for a youtube video by My Heritage featuring the Photo Detective. I thought that the entire video was interesting, and I think that it is something that all genealogists do - that we are all our own Photo Detectives. But that was not what really got my attention. 

I made a book of memories for my grandfather (I'm pretty sure that I've talked about this before). In the book I told him that some of my favorite memories of him and my grandmother surround our goodbye ritual. 

One of the things that I love about doing family history research is seeing the resemblance between different members of my family! I love looking at different pictures of family members, for example, I can tell that my maternal uncle looks strikingly similar to my maternal grandfather. 

I am truly blessed. My grandfather is restoring his house by going room to room. He is always finding new genealogical information! Today, he called me to see if I was able to come to his house. When I did he gave me cigar boxes,a suitcase, and this tin box. They were filled with amazing family history 

The storage of family history information is always on my mind, especially when I keep accumulating information. Initially, I got a trunk from my grandfather and planned to use that for family history. I love the idea of using trunks for storage. They have a sense of history themselves. One of my best friends tells an AMAZING story about her grandmother and her trunks. 

Her grandmother had three trunks. One that had been her hope chest, one that had been her mothers, and one that was her grandmothers. Every year, she would gather her granddaughters around them and go through the hope chests. She would talk about the items in the chests, showing them plates that represented their last name and salt and pepper shakers from her wedding. It was a mixture of things that they had been given and things that they had purchased. Once, she had paper dolls and allowed her granddaughters to play with the paper dolls. There were shoes and clothes and letters and books in these trunks. 

So, every year she would orally pass on the stories and the heirloom history to her granddaughters. 

When I went to my grandfather's house and saw a trunk on the front porch - one that I had passed by every day all of my life - I decided that that trunk was the one that I wanted for my own family history. How neat, I thought, it would be for me to go through a trunk with my children and grandchildren one day (in addition to being a beautiful place to store family history). My grandfather had found the trunk in the basement of an old building in town. The man that had owned the building took pictures of soldiers and stored his photography equipment in the trunks. 

I saw a picture similar to this one on pinterest.com, and my best friend Becky and I both agreed that it was a fantastic picture. The picture on pinterest had a baby hand added to the generational stack, but because I do not have children, and at one time I was a little one, I wanted to take the generational hand picture now. On the bottom is my grandfather, my mother's hands are in the middle, and mine are on top. I think that this is now one of my favorite pictures. These hands are the ones that helped me walk, changed my diaper, comforted, and fed me. 

I love looking at my grandfather's hands. He has a condition that is similar to parkinson's disease, which causes his hands to shake. His hands are the hands of a radio technician, a computer repairman, a husband, a father, an artist, and so much more. These are the hands that make the best brownies in the world. These are the hands that made colored pancakes and waffles for all of the grandchildren. His hands are scarred and wrinkled. They are rough, but soft. I love them.