Make sure to save your life story!

M

mastersmiley

New Member
How many people truly know the details of your life? Your kids probably know a few stories but definitely not everything.
It is extremely important to keep your memory alive by publishing your life story for your loved ones to read. When you are no longer near, reading the story of your life will give them comfort.
Anyway, I found a website that does this for you. (web address removed by admin)
What do you guys think?
 

My aunt and my mother are very interested too in saving and passing along family info like birthdates, who married whom, birthplaces, etc. Wasn't so much my cup of tea but one thing I did start doing a few years ago, for my daughters was to start a journal for each of them. In them, I write little notes about the things that have gone on in their or my life, what I think of those events, quotes that I feel are relevant to them or important to me, reminders of things I remember from when they were children. Those little journals will be in 'memory boxes' at the end when they are cleaning out my stuff, along with a couple of little gifts they made me when they were just little kids, special cards or the saved collar of a beloved pet and also each will have a little photo album that will have pictures from when they were little (before everyone started sharing digital photos).

I just started one for my husband too in case I die before he does. I thought he might feel left out if the girls each got this special moment but he didn't:love_heart:.

I did get one story though from my aunt before she died, about my grandmother.

My grandmother was having a very bad delivery of one of her 11 children. They lived on a farm east of Calgary and were poor immigrants originally from Europe. Someone hitched up the horse to the farm wagon and went for the doctor who grabbed his bag and went right away. He arrived, delivered a live baby and was preparing to go. My grandparents had no money to pay him, but promised to bring a chicken later that week.

Two or three years later, the Canadian government issued the first family allowance checks and in due course, my grandparents received theirs. While they had 7 children by this time, all of whom probably needed a pair of new shoes and there was always something needed to run the farm, apparently my grandmother took her first family allowance money and went over to the doctors house where she handed him some money. According to my aunt (who was likely one of the older children with her at the time), he didn't understand why she was giving him the money and she replied to him that it was payment for that night three years ago when he came and saved her from dying. She was paying him what she owed for that night.

I thought that was a pretty cool story. My grandmother was obviously a fine woman of great integrity who, even in the face of overwhelming poverty, paid her debts.
 

I have been thinking of doing this...I have already compiled the history of my dad's side of the family tree back to 1770.

Some of my children/grandchildren do not have a clue to some of the things that have happened in my lifetime.
 
I've got little more than a vague interest in what my parents did and my children are pretty well aware of what I did. Some people trace their family tree and some keep a diary. Good hobbies, but "extremely important" - no, I don't think so.
 
Oh I LOVED reading about what you're doing with the journals. What a great, nurturing mom you are, kudos to you. I didn't have the nurturing mom experience that you are giving your children and so I really can feel what a blessing it is. Many years ago I had a friend who had a loving relationship with her mom but circumstances prevented them from sharing time together as she grew older. After her mother passed and my friend had to 'clean out' her mother's house she found a large scrapbook/journal that her mother had been keeping for a long time. In it she found pasted cartoons that her mother had liked, special pictures, recipes, news articles, poems and poems that her mother wrote and other little bits of personal notes and comments. This book was absolutely a TREASURE for my friend and gave her an inside look of who her mother was as a person, as a woman, wife and mother. So it is a wonderful thing you are doing.
 
Mum

I wished my mum had written down her experiences as a young women living in London during WW2.

One was their house was bombed and they survived and going to the pictures with my dad whilst there were air raids by the Germans. Also my dad having his tooth out during the Battle of Britain without anaethestic. There is so much more.
 
My Parents shared a lot with me and my brother and sister about their past and families. I want to do the same for my children and grand kids,so I have started a journal about my life and my husbands. One of my cousins on my Dad's side is obsessed with Ancestry and I have hundreds of pages of research on the family that he did and my husbands brother did the same thing. I think my children and their children will have more information than they will ever need.
 
I loved to hear the stories the older people in my family told. I remember all of them and even as a child,on a snowy or rainy day I would ask my mom to get the old photo albums out and we would look at the photos together. I still have them and look at them often. My kids are just the opposite. They could care less. They say they never knew the person so they aren't interested and heaven forbid I should repeat a story, if I'm so lucky to tell one. All I get are the eyes rolling and then they say as drawn out and as bored as can be that they have heard the story a million times. I have decided this is their loss. I have my memories and that's what counts,true, maybe the grand kids might be interested, but I'll be long gone, and if they follow in their parents footsteps they won't want to know either. It just seems in my family they are more interested in making their own memories,which is fine, but I think there is room for both.
 
I never had kids so when I'm gone, who will care.

I do wish I knew more about what my mother went through during the war and afterward. I put up with so much of her as a child though, I had lost interest of knowing later.

For some, I think it's probably a good thing.
 
My daughter did some genealogical research. We learned that the first of my line came to the colonies in 1634, but there is a huge gap in between then and now. Two of my great grandfathers were in the Confederate army, one was a medic and the other an infantryman. The latter wound up in a POW camp in NY.
My grandmother went to what was then a "normal" school in the 1890s. My wife went to the same school in the 1950s, only by then it had become part of the state university system.

I was thinking that it would not be hard to compile a history bound in a loose leaf binder. Illustrations can be found online, such as the photo of the ocean liner on which my father served as a machinist in the 1920s.
 

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