Once Upon A Time...

Well, April in Utah this year is more like a winter wonderland than anything resembling Spring. The farm work we need to get done, like re-seeding the pasture where the horses have worn down the grass, is in a holding pattern. It is either too windy or too cold and snowy to get that done and spraying for weeds will have to wait until mid May at this rate.
It seems the only activity keeping me sane is working on my Family History Blog.

It has been interesting trying to put together personal histories for relatives who didn't write about themselves. The great thing about having so many Mormon Pioneer ancestors is that it was pretty much an expectation to have done your own genealogy and to write a history about yourself to share with future generations. It was easy at first since I had so many written histories to copy from. The first one I had to compose from my research was for my Maternal great-grandmother, Agnes Hannah Edwards Blackett. Agnes died at 41 leaving 7 children, the youngest twin girls were not quite 2 years old when she passed away. I remember thinking that it made sense that there wasn't a personal history she wrote for herself because she was so young and I'm sure she felt she had plenty of time to write her history as she got older. Getting older was not a luxury she was afforded but her story is just as important if not more so since her younger children do not have memories of her to share with their posterity.

So where do you begin? Even though the Mormon faith has made it clear of the importance of keeping a personal history, many other religions share in the importance in learning from our ancestors and preserving family heritage. It is with respect to all the many faiths in my family that I wish to continue to share the things I have found so that many more family members can turn their hearts to the hearts of their fathers. Some of my ancestors wrote a single page to express the highlights of their many decades on the earth. My Great Grandmother Emily Edwards Morris included what books she had read which I thought strange until I realized that during her lifetime access to libraries or book stores where a poor farm girl could buy any book she wanted were not really an option. Books were shared among families and if you were lucky and your parents could afford to send you to school, you might be able to read some there as you graduated thru all 8 "readers" or grades. She had read the Book of Mormon and standard church books and "Riders of the Purple Sage" by Zane Grey. She also shared that the only 2 places she had ever vacationed were Zions National Park and Bryce Canyon.

As I ask myself what are the things in my own life that I want to share with my family and the generations to come, I know the answer is affected by the lack of my own mother's willingness to share her own stories with me. My mother always thought that other peoples stories were more important or more interesting than her own. I also think that because she had made some decisions in her lifetime that she was less than proud of, she thought by keeping them to herself that somehow it was saving her family members pain or embarassment. Maybe the world is just a different place. Now days people share their innermost thoughts with complete strangers on Facebook, Twitter and Blogs. Is it really a good thing? Do we share too much making the stories somehow less important? I really can't answer that. I know that as I write on my Blog, I think of how it will affect my children and grandchildren as they read the innermost thoughts and feelings of my heart.

It is interesting as I found a personal history for myself that I started writing in 1986. This was right after I had given birth to my 2nd daughter and I was trying to work on finding my ancestors on my father's side of the family. I was 21 years old and the things I wrote that I thought were important then, I had completely forgotten about by 2009. Whether those bits of information make the final cut in my own personal history, I will always have that paper as a reminder of how much we change and to remind me that it is never too soon to start. It didn't take long in 1986 before I realized that motherhood was taking priority over finding dead ancestors so I put it away for 13 years until 1999 when I dug out my box of genealogy and started to computerize the records that I had. After my computer crashed and all the weeks of work were lost, I once again put the box away for another 10 years. In 2009, I had the time, the computer, the knowledge and the assistance of online programs such as www.ancestry.com and many other websites that other "professional" geneologist family members had taken the time to produce. I also had lost both my parents by this time and all of a sudden, when there was no generation between me and death, the importance of all of this had a whole new meaning.

So as I sit here and continue to wonder where to start my own "Once upon a time", I hope that some day what I have written makes a difference to someone in the generations to come and as they read the wild adventures that have been my life they will remember what Helen Keller said "Life is a daring adventure or nothing at all".