Thursday, January 29, 2009

Personal Histories and Blogs

Casey tagged me to write "Five Things I Like" that I published yesterday. However, I thought I should expound upon all of those things so my readers will understand a little more about me. I will have to do them separately because I will have so much to write on each one

As you all know, I am very interested in Family History. And that includes writing personal histories as well for those ancestors that you know something about. Of course, that also means that I cannot leave this life without also having my own personal history written or kept in some form. It may be easy for some descendant to come up with some kind of information about me, but I think we should also let them know something of what we are made of...that is: our personalities, our likes and dislikes, our sense of humor, our trials and our joys and most of all our testimonies.

So, I am also putting these blogs into "Personal Historian", so they will be found on my hard drive as well on CD's. And also to make it easier if I wanted to publish my histories as well. Or just parts of them.

Your blogs should be included in your personal history. They will give your grandchildren a glimpse of your everyday life and, of course, all your ups and downs. Blogs are great journals, but we need to store them in several different places.

Now, if I could only add my Facebook comments to it as well, then my grandkids will really know that I still had some wit about me in my old age.

A few years ago (and now I am off on another tangent), I transcribed all my old diaries and journals and put them into "Personal Historian"...and I kept the original spellings, etcs. However, I wrote comments on some of the events that I had written about as to how I felt about the event or what else I remembered about it, knowing that time changes our memories and our feelings about an event. I used a different font on the newer comments so that my readers would know what was then and what was now.

Here is the entry from January 15, 1947

To day I went to shool and had fun.

Transcribed:
"Today I went to school & had fun."

Looking back: (28 September 2006)
I really did enjoy school. At this time I was in the fourth grade. There were only five classrooms in the building, and so they built a lunchroom and a classroom to hold the sixth grade students next to the old building.
Mrs. Merlin L. Throlin was my fourth grade teacher. She was from American Fork.
I usually always had school lunch. I can still remember the smells of walking into that lunchroom. Even today when we come home from church on Sunday, and there is a pot roast in the oven, I will remark "Smells just like school lunch!"
I'm sure my family doesn't understand that remark because their school lunch room doesn't smell like pot roast. I don't remember if we had pot roast for school lunch, but the smell is the same. And it only cost 10 cents a day.


So, I encourage all of you to keep your blogs elsewhere as well, since you are most likely using these as journals. Anything we have posted on our computers and on the internet can be lost as easily as a piece of paper or a written journal. We need to have copies in multiple places and in different mediums. I am lucky to still have the journals I wrote when I was 9 years old. By transcribing them, hopefully I can save them for my grandchildren to read in the years to come.

1 comment:

TumbleBee said...

Sorry I couldn't read it all cuz we are sleeping in a snowfort!I will someday!