Recently I started handwriting family stories with the idea that I will be putting these together with documents and sending them out to some of the newer members of the family. These people were born way too late to have ever met the people I did, such as my grandmother who is their great great grandmother. I think how different it might have been if I had ever received such information about my own great great grandmother and had more of a sense about her!
I try my best to tell the stories with research providing the proven information, but also will add the ones that are interesting and probably true, but with the hope that my recipients will someday wish to do some research - perhaps in other countries - to prove these stories true - or to add to them.
As I handwrite, I'm surprising myself with how much I remember, and I'm also imagining how different people might take what they read. I know that once the information is in their hands, they may not even be interested, or they might put it aside until one day, maybe a bad day, they will get around to a reread and get some inspiration. Maybe some of them will think, "Who is she anyway? - oh her!" and some of them might think, "Why look back? Just look to the future."
My grandmother, their Great Great grandmother, actually used to say that very thing! She taught her children that there was no use in looking back because you couldn't change the past.
One of the reasons I want to do this is that I recently saw some pictures of two of these children, who would be her Great Great grandchildren, and I instantly saw that they LOOKED like, not their parents, not their grandparents, but their Great Great grandparents! (And a third looks like my mother's sister!)
One of them has the distinctive nose that was said to have "run in the family" on Great Great Grandma's side, and I'm awed by the mysteriousness of DNA, genetics, how that all works.
I don't know if I'll ever meet this person to see him with the nose in person, but I want to assure him it is a family trait. As this seems to be a family trait not seen in other descendants, it was last seen on someone born in the 19th century! How I hope his 19th century nose will take him wisely into the 21st!
Another person has the rest of her family towering over her and calls herself "the peanut." I want to tell her about her Great Great Grandmother who was barely five feet tall.
I also, because I don't think anyone else has, tell them about what their GG Grandparent's house looked like and smelled like, from the horribly hard and uncomfortable horse-hair filled sofa in the living room, to the goldfish in a bowl in the window, who happened to, more than once, freeze over the winter, and reanimate in the thaw!
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