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The Case for Documenting Yourself
(The following article presents a good case for writing a personal
history on yourself. Now is the time to start! --Wally Gray)
THE COMING DAY OF GENEALOGY
by Jeff Scism
Knowing where we are from is the first step on the road to where we will be. The search
for personal history and its relationship to our personal lives makes history come alive.
The lesson of genealogy isn't simply a knowledge of what happened in the past, but also
what we know about our present. Now and in the future the history documented and saved for
future reference will be the known events of our contemporary past. Our views from the end
of the 20th century will be classical perspective at the end of the 21st century.
To put the concept in perspective, think about your family research and the documentation
you find about your 19th century ancestors. How does that information impact on the data
you are saving about the lives of the members of your current family? To research the past
and store that information for easy future retrieval will be the legacy of today's
genealogist/historian. A greater legacy will be the way we store information about
ourselves. Making the research of our family's past a priority now but failing to document
our own involvement in current history is shortchanging the future.
Think about your ancestors of the year 1900, or 1800, or any year in the past. How many of
us can say we "know" these ancestors? How many of us have "living"
documents of these ancestors? Wills, marriage certificates, and short newspaper notes are
a poor "story" of a life spent. How many diary and journal writers were there in
our collective past? What was our ancestor's view of events of his/her day? Knowing the
regional history of an ancestor, and "milestone" events, can give an indication
of where and why, but to have the story in his or her own words is a priceless insight
into the person's life. Now, how many of us have an ancestor's actual autobiography
written in his or her own hand?
Right now you are a family historian studying the lives of all who came before you. Are
you documenting your own life in a "hard" form for the genealogists of the
future, so that in the year 2100 your great-great-grandchildren will be able to say they
know you? Documenting your life the way you would want your ancestors to be documented is
the first step to being the person your descendants will know from the past, and a journal
of your thoughts on current events will be a marker and a reference valuable to many, not
just your descendants.
Make the year 2000 the year that genealogy unites past and present for the future.
Document yourself.
(Written by Jeff Scism, scismgenie@juno.com, Flockmaster International
BlackSheep Society of Genealogists http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~blksheep
"Really BAAAAD ancestors make great genealogies"
Previously published by RootsWeb.com, Inc., RootsWeb Review:
RootsWeb's Genealogy News, Vol. 2, No. 34, 25 August 1999.
RootsWeb: http://www.rootsweb.com/)
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The Value of Genealogical Stories
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