Day #71: Documenting My Kids' History
Somehow I have become the keeper of the family history.
It's not a job I asked for but one that has come to me through my mom. It's a combination of being interested in family history, not being a minimalist, and living in a house where we save things.
When I was a child, my mom kept a series of about 10 photo albums on a shelf in our rec room, near where they kept Time Life books and things like that. They were numbered...starting with her early adult years and going through her wedding album, early marriage, and I think #10 went through 1986 or so...after I was about eight years old I thought she had stopped keeping albums. I went through them a lot...the albums of her as a young teacher and in her 20s traveling with friends didn't interest me but I loved looking at her wedding album and the ones that followed it...her pregnancy, my sister as a newborn, me as a newborn and then family stuff from the first eight or so years of my life. I looked at them a lot and knew them pretty well.
In 2000, when my dad got married he sold the house and got rid of a lot of stuff. He also put a lot of it that I wanted saved into a storage unit for me because I was 21 at the time and still in college and he knew I wasn't ready to have a lot of it. We kept that storage unit until 2004 at which point I finally took the last of the stuff to my apartment. I still regularly get stuff from my dad, who has been downsizing his house a lot since my stepmother passed away in 2016, and he still is throwing stuff away. Over the years a few things have gone that I wish I still had...cut glass dishes that my great aunt passed to my mother, a library table that had belonged to my father's great-grandfather, but all things considered my dad has been good about saving the stuff he knew I wanted and one of them was a couple of boxes of photo albums. I thought I knew what was in there and they sat in a box for a very long time.
Sometime around 2010, my best friend, who had gotten into genealogy because her grandmother was, got me into it. I assumed most of it had been done and researched by my mother, who did a family history project in the late 1980s and early 1990s, kicked off at my great grandmother's hundredth birthday in 1988. I knew there was a book (which I still haven't seen) of family history compiled by my father's cousin (second cousin, I think) floating around. So I thought I knew what I needed to know. I did not, and I have been unpacking what is true, what is false, and what is yet to be discovered ever since. As part of that process and especially when we moved into this house in 2014 and finally had more space, I dug out the photo albums and it turns out I have a lot more things than I thought I did. I somehow never realized that of the 10 numbered books my mother had only 9 of them were on that Time Life shelf...there was a falling apart one of her childhood, mostly filled with pictures of her and her siblings and their family members from the 1950s and 1960s, a lot of which I think I have the only remaining copies of. In addition to that, in this box of photo albums I found a family history she put together that contained photographs her grandmother had passed on by her mother, including a birthday card sent to my great great grandmother from her son in France in 1918, a family photo of my great grandmother's family from before she left Illinois in 1910 and a telegram sent by my grandfather to my grandmother from his ship in the Pacific in 1944. In addition, on my dad's side, I found an album that she had borrowed from my dad's aunt, no longer with us, that was a family history written by my great grandfather's stepfather in the 1940s. It includes a tintype of my great great great grandfather who died at Vicksburg in 1863 and a lock of his wife's hair, as well as a ton of other things, plus there's an entire folder of family photos from that family, most of which sadly are unidentified.
Why, of all the people they could have ended up with, all this stuff has come to me, maintains an enduring mystery but I try to take good care of it. At this point some of the albums are in terrible shape and need to be redone and just about everything needs to be scanned. And every year I swear I find more stuff...scrapbooks of old Girl Scout troops from the 1980s, old family newsletters, all kinds of things. It's like I think I know what I have and then I pull it out and it's more than I thought it was. I pulled out a book last night that fell off a shelf when I was trying to put the falling apart book, which I pulled out to show my dad at Christmas and have had trouble finding a place for ever since because it doesn't sit on a shelf well, it's in that bad of shape, back. This particular book (not the falling apart one, the one that fell on my head,) is a family scrapbook from 1988-1992, so it contains few photos but a lot of things that were deemed worth saving...poems I wrote for people's birthdays (apparently I never had in money in this era of my life so I wrote birthday poems to people instead of giving presents,) Christmas lists my sister and I wrote, school assignments she particularly liked, letters home from camp, a short story I had published in a local newspaper in 1992, all those kinds of things. I can see my life in that book...there's an entire five page section where you can tell I've discovered glitter glue because it's on everything.
And that's the moment when I started to feel the mom guilt. Because...I don't do this. I started reading Anne Lammott's Operating Instructions yesterday, which is the book she wrote about her son's first year (he was born in 1989.) It's based on journals she kept that year. I don't have that. I have memories of my kids' early years...but Max's especially are hard to capture in my mind because with two kids you are just so effing busy. Do we take pictures? Of course we do! By the thousands...unlike my mom, I have a camera in my pocket everywhere I go. But the rest of it...I have a box that has some art projects and a hospital bracelet and some ephemera in it but it isn't organized. I did do a baby journal with James but like every journal I've ever kept in my life it gets far less complete as the time goes on. There is a second volume for the toddler years and I think it's almost completely empty if not totally empty. Maybe I should use it for Max. That's actually not the worst idea I've ever had. But I'm not good at this sort of thing. My pregnancy journal was only half full. The first pregnancy. See also my wedding planning journal.
Honestly, this is why I'm grateful for facebook. Facebook is kind of the devil, as I have said before, but a lot of the photos and day to day little anecdotes of my children's first years have ended up there. I see them pop up in facebook memories. I'm grateful that they are there. I need to every kid's birthday save a copy of everything on facebook so they can have it. It's not the best way of keeping the records of their childhoods, but it's better than nothing. I guess. And I'm doing this now...I've been doing it for a couple of months. I guess it is something. A friend who is a regular blog reader said to me awhile back that she likes seeing my kids' little personalities develop and pop up by reading about them here.
I wish I could do what my mom did for me but it's not the first thing I wish I did as well as her and I doubt it will be the last. Probably not a good idea to beat myself up about what I'm not doing...but to just be grateful for what's been done for me and keep doing my best. Way easier to say than to do.
Today's media consumption: more Dick van Dyke. Been pretty down the past couple of days so have had trouble getting up and going in the mornings, meaning too much TV for everyone. I watched the first episode of Little Fires Everywhere and so far am kind of disappointed by it. The book was better. Josh and I watched the final of the Dorktown Seattle Mariners documentary and the special Parks and Recreation episode to raise money for COVID-19 charities, which was...not great, there was no way it could be great, but it still made me smile and you'd better believe I sang Bye Bye Lil' Sebastian with them. For books, other than Operating Instructions I finished Will Grayson, Will Grayson on audio and while I didn't love it as much as I remember I did when I read it 10 years ago, I still liked it a lot.
Today I'm grateful for my mom, my husband, reading with James, reading with Max, which is a very different experience, walking with Max, that today isn't the weekend even though it felt like it (because it means the weekend is still coming, assuming weekends mean anything anymore,) my body pillow, good friends, and another day of this crazy, absurd, but still quite beautiful life.
It's not a job I asked for but one that has come to me through my mom. It's a combination of being interested in family history, not being a minimalist, and living in a house where we save things.
When I was a child, my mom kept a series of about 10 photo albums on a shelf in our rec room, near where they kept Time Life books and things like that. They were numbered...starting with her early adult years and going through her wedding album, early marriage, and I think #10 went through 1986 or so...after I was about eight years old I thought she had stopped keeping albums. I went through them a lot...the albums of her as a young teacher and in her 20s traveling with friends didn't interest me but I loved looking at her wedding album and the ones that followed it...her pregnancy, my sister as a newborn, me as a newborn and then family stuff from the first eight or so years of my life. I looked at them a lot and knew them pretty well.
In 2000, when my dad got married he sold the house and got rid of a lot of stuff. He also put a lot of it that I wanted saved into a storage unit for me because I was 21 at the time and still in college and he knew I wasn't ready to have a lot of it. We kept that storage unit until 2004 at which point I finally took the last of the stuff to my apartment. I still regularly get stuff from my dad, who has been downsizing his house a lot since my stepmother passed away in 2016, and he still is throwing stuff away. Over the years a few things have gone that I wish I still had...cut glass dishes that my great aunt passed to my mother, a library table that had belonged to my father's great-grandfather, but all things considered my dad has been good about saving the stuff he knew I wanted and one of them was a couple of boxes of photo albums. I thought I knew what was in there and they sat in a box for a very long time.
Sometime around 2010, my best friend, who had gotten into genealogy because her grandmother was, got me into it. I assumed most of it had been done and researched by my mother, who did a family history project in the late 1980s and early 1990s, kicked off at my great grandmother's hundredth birthday in 1988. I knew there was a book (which I still haven't seen) of family history compiled by my father's cousin (second cousin, I think) floating around. So I thought I knew what I needed to know. I did not, and I have been unpacking what is true, what is false, and what is yet to be discovered ever since. As part of that process and especially when we moved into this house in 2014 and finally had more space, I dug out the photo albums and it turns out I have a lot more things than I thought I did. I somehow never realized that of the 10 numbered books my mother had only 9 of them were on that Time Life shelf...there was a falling apart one of her childhood, mostly filled with pictures of her and her siblings and their family members from the 1950s and 1960s, a lot of which I think I have the only remaining copies of. In addition to that, in this box of photo albums I found a family history she put together that contained photographs her grandmother had passed on by her mother, including a birthday card sent to my great great grandmother from her son in France in 1918, a family photo of my great grandmother's family from before she left Illinois in 1910 and a telegram sent by my grandfather to my grandmother from his ship in the Pacific in 1944. In addition, on my dad's side, I found an album that she had borrowed from my dad's aunt, no longer with us, that was a family history written by my great grandfather's stepfather in the 1940s. It includes a tintype of my great great great grandfather who died at Vicksburg in 1863 and a lock of his wife's hair, as well as a ton of other things, plus there's an entire folder of family photos from that family, most of which sadly are unidentified.
Why, of all the people they could have ended up with, all this stuff has come to me, maintains an enduring mystery but I try to take good care of it. At this point some of the albums are in terrible shape and need to be redone and just about everything needs to be scanned. And every year I swear I find more stuff...scrapbooks of old Girl Scout troops from the 1980s, old family newsletters, all kinds of things. It's like I think I know what I have and then I pull it out and it's more than I thought it was. I pulled out a book last night that fell off a shelf when I was trying to put the falling apart book, which I pulled out to show my dad at Christmas and have had trouble finding a place for ever since because it doesn't sit on a shelf well, it's in that bad of shape, back. This particular book (not the falling apart one, the one that fell on my head,) is a family scrapbook from 1988-1992, so it contains few photos but a lot of things that were deemed worth saving...poems I wrote for people's birthdays (apparently I never had in money in this era of my life so I wrote birthday poems to people instead of giving presents,) Christmas lists my sister and I wrote, school assignments she particularly liked, letters home from camp, a short story I had published in a local newspaper in 1992, all those kinds of things. I can see my life in that book...there's an entire five page section where you can tell I've discovered glitter glue because it's on everything.
And that's the moment when I started to feel the mom guilt. Because...I don't do this. I started reading Anne Lammott's Operating Instructions yesterday, which is the book she wrote about her son's first year (he was born in 1989.) It's based on journals she kept that year. I don't have that. I have memories of my kids' early years...but Max's especially are hard to capture in my mind because with two kids you are just so effing busy. Do we take pictures? Of course we do! By the thousands...unlike my mom, I have a camera in my pocket everywhere I go. But the rest of it...I have a box that has some art projects and a hospital bracelet and some ephemera in it but it isn't organized. I did do a baby journal with James but like every journal I've ever kept in my life it gets far less complete as the time goes on. There is a second volume for the toddler years and I think it's almost completely empty if not totally empty. Maybe I should use it for Max. That's actually not the worst idea I've ever had. But I'm not good at this sort of thing. My pregnancy journal was only half full. The first pregnancy. See also my wedding planning journal.
Honestly, this is why I'm grateful for facebook. Facebook is kind of the devil, as I have said before, but a lot of the photos and day to day little anecdotes of my children's first years have ended up there. I see them pop up in facebook memories. I'm grateful that they are there. I need to every kid's birthday save a copy of everything on facebook so they can have it. It's not the best way of keeping the records of their childhoods, but it's better than nothing. I guess. And I'm doing this now...I've been doing it for a couple of months. I guess it is something. A friend who is a regular blog reader said to me awhile back that she likes seeing my kids' little personalities develop and pop up by reading about them here.
I wish I could do what my mom did for me but it's not the first thing I wish I did as well as her and I doubt it will be the last. Probably not a good idea to beat myself up about what I'm not doing...but to just be grateful for what's been done for me and keep doing my best. Way easier to say than to do.
Today's media consumption: more Dick van Dyke. Been pretty down the past couple of days so have had trouble getting up and going in the mornings, meaning too much TV for everyone. I watched the first episode of Little Fires Everywhere and so far am kind of disappointed by it. The book was better. Josh and I watched the final of the Dorktown Seattle Mariners documentary and the special Parks and Recreation episode to raise money for COVID-19 charities, which was...not great, there was no way it could be great, but it still made me smile and you'd better believe I sang Bye Bye Lil' Sebastian with them. For books, other than Operating Instructions I finished Will Grayson, Will Grayson on audio and while I didn't love it as much as I remember I did when I read it 10 years ago, I still liked it a lot.
Today I'm grateful for my mom, my husband, reading with James, reading with Max, which is a very different experience, walking with Max, that today isn't the weekend even though it felt like it (because it means the weekend is still coming, assuming weekends mean anything anymore,) my body pillow, good friends, and another day of this crazy, absurd, but still quite beautiful life.
Comments
Post a Comment