4. Building Your House of Memories — Engage Your Audience by Adding Context to Your Memories
Now that you have determined who you will feature in your house of memories, determined your tags, and organized and prioritized your digital files, it’s time to begin to add context to your memories as you upload them to your eMemory account.
In order to ensure that your house of memories is the treasured legacy you want it to be, you must keep your audience in mind as you add context to your memories. Who are you going to be sharing your memories with? What will interest them the most? What details, and how many details, will they need to fully understand the context of the memories you are sharing with them?
Here are some simple guidelines to help you write the context of the various files you store in your house of memories:
- Include References to Historical Events and Conditions — Based on what year or day the memory came from, it will be interesting to your audience to reflect on what was going on in the world, country or city at the time the memory was created. For example, my great-great grandfather, Hermann Enke, owned a felt factory in Ghent, Belgium in the late 1800s. The floor plan for the factory is one of the scanned documents in our family’s eMemory account. This was an extremely profitable venture at the time, because felt hats were the fashion in England and across Europe, and the Canadian fur trade was booming, making the felt supply plentiful and relatively inexpensive in a marketplace where demand was very high. Adding this note to that scanned floorplan provides useful context to the generation of young people who may not understand why a felt factory was such a good idea at the time.
- Add Insights into Personalities — Seeing a face in a photo and a name and birth / death date is interesting, but insights into personalities are what creates memories that are most valuable. Add notes to photos that enlighten your audience as to the personalities of who is in the photos. These insights may also provide clues as to personalities of the descendants of some of those people. For example, my great-great-great grandfather was a man named Dr. Alexander McLaren, who was a very famous Baptist preacher in Scotland in the 1800s. He was known at the time as one of the best religious orators in Scotland in his day — perhaps that gift is alive today in his great-great-great grand-daughter, who loves to speak in front of large crowds in her business career?
- Don’t Hide the Bad Stuff — Life is challenging, and messy, and for some people a reeling series of disasters caused by ignorance, arrogance or vice. A family’s history is shaped by the worst and the best parts of human nature, and the stories of the worst parts are often where the greatest learnings and most interesting stories come from. These traits can also provide valuable insight for future generations into what weaknesses run in their genes, and what they should be conscious of as they evolve as a family, to ensure as much prosperity as possible for future generations.
So start uploading your memories, and start sharing your family stories! And stay tuned for the next blog post, which will outline your next important step as you build your house of memories.
Did you like this one? You can read the previous one clicking the titles below.
Enjoy your memories!
Below you can find the previous article of the series “Building Your House of Memories”
- Building Your House of Memories — Organize, Prioritize and Digitalize!
- Building Your House of Memories — Determine Your Tagging, “Save As” and Sharing Practices Before You Start
- How to Build Your House of Memories — Where Do I Start, and Who Do I Focus on First
