Over the years as a journalist I realized how many people had great stories to tell about their lives and times on this earth. When I heard a story from someone, I often said, “I ought to write something about that.”
People would look at me with a proverbial deer in the headlights look and say, “Why? My life is so uninteresting.”
That common statement made me realize something. We all have a gem or two in our lives that has not been dug out of the deep mine that is the mind. We know things that others don’t. We have had experiences that others have not had, and even if they did, ours is always different.
While it’s true a newspaper cannot tell the story of every person in a community (well I guess it could if the town was very, very small) that is not necessarily the value of the story. And while most people are not professional writers, they can note their time on this earth with some good tales, if nothing else for their sake to look back at and certainly for posterity.
While you may not think you have anything to tell, others will tell you that is not true.
My personal experience with this is telling. My father considered himself nothing special, yet his life was very interesting, because of the kind of life it was. A dairy farmer, self employed his entire life, his snippets about the things he did, what it was like growing up in the 1920s and 1930s and his view of the world from someone who held down the home front during World War II were fascinating. The problem is that I don’t have enough of them and what I do have is incomplete. And most come from what I heard, not something he put down or we recorded on the spot. I can tell you from experience that my mind is very fallible, and in many of those stories he related to me there are many loose ends, things I can no longer ask him about since he passed away almost 11 years ago.
My mom was an immigrant from Holland.
She had tales of living in Europe during the 1920s and then her experience as a young woman in the United States having to give up an education to help support her family at the age of 12 by working in a bakery in Salt Lake City. Then there were her stories about making the transition from being a city girl and having to move to the country, a place she had never lived at all until 1939 when she married my dad. The same issues I have with my dad’s past are true with her as it is with my father. I only have bits and pieces of her stories.
In the 1980s my wife and I went on a road trip with my parents for a day and at the time I made a point of bringing a cassette recorder and asked them some things about their past. That tape has been lost, and besides when I did listen to it after the trip the car noise covered up some of what they had to say. But having it would have been a gold mine compared to what I have to work with now.
Plenty of research resources
In recent years people have taken a much larger interest in learning about their ancestors. This has nothing to do with religion for many people, it has to do with roots. People want to know where they came from and what it was like for the ancestors.
There are many resources for people to turn to to learn about those that came before them, but there is no better resource for anyone than some documentation from the person that actually lived the life. So no matter your age, start to keep a diary or even audio/video recordings about some of what you have done in your life. If you are 20 years old, in 60 years your kids will be interested in what you experienced. If you are 80, then do something to record your past and even your time now in this ever changing world.
Because when you are gone those experiences will be lost if you don’t do something to preserve them.