Leave your family a treasure - your life's story

I am always happy to see on my Stats that my blog is read in countries far from where I live. Next to the United States, my largest number of pageviews come from Russia. In fact, all of western Europe shows on my map.

I'd love to hear from real people in those countries and not anonymous Spammers. I used to follow a blog by a woman in Australia. I enjoyed her so much, but she disappeared off the Internet. Another woman in England had a very interesting blog, but I lost her, too.

Lately, I've been so busy that I can hardly keep up my two blogs. Besides this one, I also post on my Writers Circle blog. I write about the classes I teach and the instructors who come to my studio and teach. I spend much time on the computer. I get email from writers who want my help or want to know where they can take classes. Some just want to ask me questions about the craft of writing. Many ask about publishing. My advice for most is this: Learn to write well before you consider publishing. Take classes, workshops with good teachers. Read books on writing and write as often as you can. Invest in your writing - both time and money. 

Two of my aunts back in the '40s

I will be teaching another class beginning September 1 at the local community college. This is a 2 hour, once a week class on writing about your life for your family or for publication. This is the most popular class I teach. I had a call from someone who lives about an hour from me and she wants me to come to her town and teach. I enjoy teaching older people. They have the most wonderful stories about their lives. The older the person, the more unusual stories they have to tell. The stories by people who grew up in the northern part of the country or in the west are fascinating to me because their lives were so different from mine. 

It is never too late to tell your life story. Don't worry where to begin. Just start with something in your life you want to tell about. Don't try to begin at birth and tell every detail. Just tell the most interesting parts of your life. Try to tell your stories in an entertaining way. Picture youself on TV and you and others are acting out the episode you want us to know. Write the story in scenes.

Try it. It is fun. Collect those true stories or personal essays and one day you will have enough to make a book for your family. Although they might not seem to be interested right now, they will one day treasure your words.

Have you written anything to leave your children or grandchildren?

How Do You Want to be Remembered - Re-visited

A couple of years ago I wrote an article - How Do You Want to be Remembered? - which is one of the most often read page on this blog. Every single day it is in the top three page views.

Can there be that many people wanting to read how someone wants to be remembered? At the time I posted that article, the thought hung heavy over me. I wondered about my legacy.

Looking back to when I was young, I wanted to be a woman with great talent and ability. I wanted people, certain ones in particular, to recognize me as someone special. But I have never felt that I was someone of special qualities, someone who would be remembered for years and years to come. That's why I wanted to write a book. People have always respected books - at least I have. I would often pick up a book in the library and read about the author. I marveled that this person who had been dead for a century or more was still leaving his imprint on the world by the words he had written in the book.

When I decided to write a family history book back in the eighties, I didn't think then of my lasting legacy so much as I did the people I documented in that book, Profiles and Pedigrees, Tom C. Council and his Descendents. My beloved aunts and uncles where passing on and their stories I'd heard all my life would soon be forgotten, I thought. I dedicated the ten years I cared for my mother to collecting those stories for a book. My cousins were happy to help me with research and photographs. The book was well received by family. Even the youngest ones mentioned have asked for their own copy and want to know if I will continue with the next generations.

I didn't have the technology we have today, no Ancestry.com and no access to records on the Internet. But I did have the benefit of oral history passed down to me. My book is a family history with genealogy listings, not a memoir or a biography. Because the stories of Aunt Oleo's house being flooded, and another home being burned to the ground, and her husband being shot by his brother-in-law, were part of the fiber of the family's oral history, I can't swear that every word is true. But my story gives the essence of who Oleo Council was, her perseverance and tenacity during a lifetime that rivaled Job's for patience.

My story of my parents was the story told to me by my mother and father, my sisters and brothers, cousins and from my own experience growing up in a large family. I have always had a curiosity. I asked questions.  I want to continue that story now with the family history including the lives of my siblings. Somehow, I hope that writing their stories and having them printed on paper in a hard cover book, will keep them alive in the minds of the next several generations.

How would they like to be remembered? I don't know for sure. I think I will find that as I write about them. Just as I learn about myself from writing, I will learn how I remember them and how I want them to be remembered.