Preserving family history

Thanksgiving is just days away and while I’ve long since gotten over the whole Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock communing with benevolent, yet unsuspecting Native Americans story, I have always appreciated this holiday for the time I get to spend with family. It’s one of my favorite holidays actually, because it is less about crass commercialism (although the retailers have cleverly snagged the day after Thanksgiving as ‘Black Friday’) and more about people just coming together to enjoy each other’s company around a good meal. Like getting a special day off just to go out to dinner.

I’ll be heading “home” for the day. Despite being quite adult, thank you, my tiny apartment is just where I happen to live. Home is that place upstate where Mom still lives and where we all grew up. Another brother and his son, my nephew, will be there as well, along with my oldest brother, so there will be five for dinner. We were discussing the menu the other day during our weekly iChat and there will be several cooks in the kitchen.

While I’m home I’ll also get to do more work on a personal project I’ve undertaken. For the past three months I’ve been audio recording interviews with my mother, to gather family history and her personal stories about growing up, her immediate and extended family, living in the deep south during the depression and World War II, going off to college, meeting Dad, that kind of stuff.

In December 2005, my father died. About five months later, his younger brother and only remaining sibling passed. In September 2006, my mother’s younger brother died and then her mother passed last December. In August of this year, while I was on blog hiatus, we had a family reunion. I got to meet a lot of relatives I never knew before and see others I just haven’t seen in ages. Mom, at 82, is the second oldest member of the entire clan. This string of events made me realize that my access to information about my own family history currently resides in the mind of just one person and the clock is ticking. I’ve completely lost the ability to learn about my father’s side of the family since there are no more of his immediate family members alive.

It has been a fun and enlightening process that I highly recommend for anyone. I bought an iPod and a simple microphone that plugs into it, the iTalk, so I can then upload the audio and manipulate it in iTunes or burn a CD. I got the idea for this project from StoryCorps, although I’ve taken it a step further. We’ve done about three hours thus far and although they are relaxed and informal, I’ve tried to ask her about her life in a chronological order.

Mom doesn’t always want to answer every question and I often have to ask in more than one way to try to get more information out of her. What we might see as obstacles today–namely living in segregated New Orleans, Louisiana in the 1930’s–was no big deal as you hear her tell it. That was the way things were and you just worked around it. In some respects, it seems there was more of a sense of Black community then, because they had to do for themselves. Money was more likely to stay in the community as opposed to being spent in some large White business establishment.I have found out some surprising things too. My mother was in a girl singing group as a child, singing mostly spirituals. She displayed the meticulous and organized personality she would grow into very early on in life. And she didn’t take to my father initially, although apparently he liked her right from the start. He had to work on her. Their marriage lasted 56 years so he must have done something right.