1. How to Build Your House of Memories — Where Do I Start, and Who Do I Focus on First?
If you have 12 minutes to spare today, watch this incredible short film about how we all have a “house of memories’ and how important it is to preserve them.
If you are reading this, you are likely passionate about or at least vaguely interested in how to preserve precious family memories for the benefit of future generations.
I definitely am — I’m one of the (few) people in my family who has the geneaology records, has copies of old photos, has boxes of old books and records from my own life as well as the lives of many of my ancestors. And I really enjoy spending time learning about family history, and making sure that our family records are preserved for the use of future generations.
Like many people, my family’s story is varied, international, and interesting. My maternal ancestors were Italian and Argentinian— my grandparents were poor, uneducated immigrants from Friuli, in northern Italy, who left the “old country” to build a life in western Canada in the early 1900s. My paternal ancestors were a mixture of (mostly wealthy and intellectual) French Huguenot, British, and German people who migrated all over the world in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The collective descendants of my ancestors (that we know about) currently live in Canada, the United States, the UK, Italy, and Australia.
So the question came to me, as I started building our secure, private family history “house of memories” on eMemory — Where Do I Start, and Who Do I Focus on First?
Here’s the first step — Pick a person, or a specific branch of your family that you are interested in, and ideally have information and records for already, and focus on them first.
My choice was pretty easy — my paternal grandmother, Ruth Enke, did a lot of work on our family history and documented a lot of it in her memoirs. I also have a distant cousin in Australia (an ancestor of my grandmother’s uncle, who emigrated to Western Australia in the late 1800s) who is very passionate about geneaology and has done a lot of research into our family’s history. My uncle has boxes of records about my grandmother — old photos, old books, letters, notes — that he has been organizing for years. So the choice was pretty evident.
But I was also conflicted — I’m extremely passionate about my Italian heritage and REALLY wanted to focus on the life of my mother and my maternal grandparents and ancestors. The members of that family who have the memories are getting older and I feel some urgency in capturing those before they are gone.
But the volume of information we have about our paternal family, the number of people in our family who are interested in that information, and the opportunity to (finally) have led me to start a shared family archive in eMemory where multiple members of our family can upload, tag, notate and share photos, documents, voice files and other types of memories in our private family “vault” of memories.
So I’m saving the memories about my Italian family until later — continuing to learn and research and record memories, but focusing on building our eMemory family archive for my paternal family.
Picking one person, or line of a family, can help you focus on the “who” part of your house — whose memories are in it, and, most importantly, who to share it with.
Here below you can follow the next ones. Follow the articles to define how to build your House of Memories!
