I wonder if a few years from now our family members will read our blogs with the same fascination. Our blogs are talking about people from our past, but we are writing about all of these with our own words and thoughts. I have put many stories of my younger days here and hope to write more.
Will our blogs become treasures to the future generations? Most people do not write letters or journals like they did in the past. Life moves so quickly now. You know, I believe that is probably what people were thinking a hundred years ago too. Do our lives move more quickly. We have lots of things to do, but our conveniences have made those much less time consuming, so really we are just doing different things. Our writings consist of e-mails, texts, tweets, and other social media communications.
Of course, there are many more things about history amassed on the Internet and digital media, but where is the personal aspect of history going to come from. It is always great to find records, but it is amazing to find actual day to day personal histories written by that individual. We are all creating those on a regular basis with our blogs. It isn't written in our own hand-writing, but it is written from our own experiences. They may think we were a little obsessed with searching our family history, and in most cases they would be correct.
When my son was born we actually hand wrote journals about his day to day life and got comments from him to add to the pages. When he was old enough we asked him to tell us the best and worst things that happened to him that day. We wrote in journals off and on until early elementary. I wrote his journal entries for him when he wanted to put down his thoughts. Life got busy along somewhere in early elementary and the journals fell to the wayside. We already enjoy going back through those and reading them together and laughing about those days. I hope someday he can read them to his children and grandchildren and they will know what our lives were like.
I have always scrapbooked, too. Many moms who scrapbook journal on their pages, which is also a great form of creating family history. They create beautiful scrapbooks of their families and we have seen a few of those from our ancestors now being posted on blogs. It is so important to record your family history for future generations.My blog posts are an extension of this type of creating a history for future generations.
I have an offline blog that records our family pictures. I find it easier to write using photos that I've taken. Sometimes it won't be right then, but at some time later I'll get the stories down.
ReplyDeleteI also create scrapbooks for each child every year, and a family scrapbook. My two oldest children do their scrapbooks entirely by themselves. My next two, tell me what to say, what pictures to use, etc. My youngest guy is just learning to talk... so I do his.
At some point, I need to find a way to keep the spiritual and personal side of me. I want the kids to know that sometimes life isn't found in the pictures.
Thanks for the post. Hopefully we're not forgetting to record our personal history while we're researching the past.