The Historian

I've known for a very long time (like, since I was 13... I can pinpoint the moment exactly) that someday in the future I would be neck deep in the history of my family, researching it, discovering the people, and chronicling their lives.  I've dabbled in it a little - hearing stories from my mom, and occasionally my grandma, going on vacation to Colorado where my great-great grandfather was a doctor in a mining town, or visiting the cemetery just north of my home where my great-great-great-and-everything-else aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins and all sorts of relatives are buried.

I've never really known when this was going to happen.  I remember once, I helped my mom in her family research, looking for names of our family who settled on the east coast back in... 1600's?  Maybe it was 1700's.  Something like that.  She discovered Jane of Nanjemy, and I found Elizabeth Jones.  It was SO exciting, and I had a wonderful feeling.  It was this overwhelming feeling of "right."

But, it only came once.  I didn't really go back - just helped her once, and then did temple work for the people we found.  I've wanted to do it more, but never really had the time... or felt like it was time.  I've always sort of felt there were other, more relevant to here and now things I should be doing. 

I took a class on family history about a year ago.  Yep, leave it to BYU to have a class devoted 100% to family history, that is completely devoid of anything else related to the study of history.  This class isn't a part of the history department.  It's religion.

Which basically means that while choosing classes not related to my history major, I chose a class related to my history major.

Anyway, when I took that class, I wondered if it was time to make my family's history a focus in my life.  My intuitive answer?  Nope.  Not yet.  I kinda felt like the class, while it presented a lot of useful information that would help me in the future (assuming I could remember it), but it wasn't particularly relevant to my present life.

Well, at least my present life if you were reading this about a year ago.

Flashing forward to the real present.

Today is General Conference.  I'm glad - I could use a solid dose of spirituality right now, and there have been a lot of really good talks.  One of the talks, by David Bednar, was on family history.  He talked about finding our family, and using the church website to get started, and doing temple work for them.  It was all pretty interesting.

The mostly interesting part, however, was the feeling I got.  It was exactly the same as all those years ago (I think it was about 6 years ago), when I was researching with my mom.  It was an overwhelming feeling of "right."

I think it's time to get started.

The best place to start is with what I already know - my own life's history.  It's where my story starts, and when I'm writing things I already know, I can learn and figure out what I'm doing.  I can also write about my immediate family, and then closely extended family.  When I have that chronicled, I can move to great-grandparents, and then farther up, so on and so forth.

But, where do I put all this research?  It's gotta be digital so it's searchable, and it's gotta be in a format I can enjoy working with.  But, it's also gotta be something I can print out and have a hard copy of.

So, I recently discovered that blogger will publish your blog posts into a book.  I love blogging.  It just made using the Internet to chronicle life and family history plausible.  Hopefully they'll keep offering that service for as long as I'm using it.

Anyway, I'm thinking about starting a new blog where I write my life's stories.  It wouldn't be a public blog - I'd have to approve readers first.  I'd include stories from my memories, and things from family members.  For example, last time I was at home I stayed up until about 2 in the morning (after thinking I was going to bed at about 9) talking to my dad, hearing the history of the computer and the Internet from his own experiences.  It was SUPER fascinating!  His playing with computers in high school, college where data was transferred with punch cards!  Yeah, that one blew my mind.  There wasn't a cable or anything.  You programmed things into a punch card.  I spent the whole time wishing I had a recorder or something to get all those memories down, so I could write it all out into a permanent form.  Maybe I can get him to email me the story or something. 

Anyway, stories like that are bits and pieces of the history of our world, from the lens of actual people who are living in this world.  I want to write them down.  Then I want to research other family members, and hopefully find their stories.  I want to keep going back and back and back until I find as many stories from as many different time periods as I can.

Now... where to begin...

Dear shoulder, what did I ever do to you???

Oh, that's right.  I took you tubing and dislocated you again.  Alright, I'm sorry.  I'll be more careful in the future... probably... as long as a fun tubing activity doesn't come up again.  Can you please let me get to sleep now???  If I can't sleep, I'm going to write boring stuff on my blog and annoy people on facebook.  You don't want that, do you?
Maybe I'll just go eat a cookie.
Love,
Me.