Preserve Your Family History--Start Today!

(c) 2007 Sheridan Hill-- Call 808 639 6560 for more information.

We are losing the older generation. Like Ken Burns, personal biographers such as myself are painstakingly uncovering and preserving the individual histories of the World War II generation. They are the only ones capable of remembering your family members who came from the old country, who knew a world when there were no computers, no cell phones, no satellites, a world in which no nuclear weapons had ever been detonated.

Their lives, their loves and losses, their lessons, are completely unique and irreplaceable. There will never, ever be another generation like them.

"Your biography becomes your biology." So says Carolyn Myss, Ph.D., a renowned medical intuitive. She teaches that how a person invests energy (thinking, feeling, speech) in his or her past can either drain life force or provide more zest for life.

Psychologist James Pennebaker  has long been convinced that talking about life experiences can be healing at deep levels.  Personal historians, a relatively new profession, are not psychologists, nor do we purport to stimulate healing -- but we see first-hand the benefits when people tell their life stories. To listen, without judgement nor an abundance of emotion, to simply witness the story of another is a profound gesture—and in the case of the personal historian, the process also yields an heirloom book.

Maybe you don't have time now to take Granma or Granpa's personal history, and maybe you don't have funds to hire a personal historian, but you can take one step this week that will make a difference.

Visit your elders, take along an inexpensive recorder or even your cell phone set to recording mode, simply ask about their lives while the recorder runs. Afterwards, take the tape or transfer the cell phone file to CD, mark in permanent ink the date and person interviewed and put it in a safe place: a file box, a shelf near the family Bible. Down the road, the audio file can be transcribed. If you can continue the dialogue several times, all the better, but to make one interview is better than never to have tried at all.           

The fourth and perhaps best reason to make your personal history and family history book is that the process is a spectacular celebration of life. In reflecting on our lives, we can create for our descendants a record (a letter, a book, a CD, a DVD) of our gleanings and glories. In so doing, we can release past wounds and face the present moment as well as the future –including all of its unknowns -- with grace and strength. (c) 2007 Sheridan Hill