Written in response to Todays WP prompt: Imagine yourself at the end of your life. What sort of legacy will you leave? Describe the lasting effect you want to have on the world, after you’re gone.
Ancestry.com features ads on the benefits of learning one’s family heritage through learning the names of your ancestors.
Each ad reminds us that there is a legacy of people behind those who live today. Spending time researching your family history is a worthy endeavor. But, for me, those names with their dash dates are missing a key element.
Their story.
My family has no written legacy of our ancestors. Yet, this is what I yearn to know. My own mother left a living legacy of her love, which shines on into our lives to this day. Yet, there is little known of her life story. We have lost all she could have told, now that she is gone. 
What is the story behind those names of your ancestors?
What is the story behind the photos?
It is precisely these stories that I want to leave as a legacy to my family.
While most of us are simply living our lives, working and playing, reading and sleeping, loving and learning, each of us is important in the continuum of life.
Each of us is an irreplaceable lived-life.
A lifetime can be conveyed in written snippets or vignettes that preserves a life legacy, a heritage for future descendants. A memoir embedded with life and love bridges the gap between generations and family members because of our common human experience.
We all have memoirs that are unique only to us. Each of our lives has special moments and mementoes. It is these we need to memorialize in our memoirs .
Just imagine how you would feel if today you unexpectedly receive a parcel in the mail that had just one life memory story for each person on your ancestral tree. How would you feel?
For anyone interested in family history, these memory stories have far more significance, as they are filled with the emotion and details that only a story can tell.
We each have a life story to tell.
With one son now interested in our family history, my hope is to gift a legacy of family memoirs for him to share with his descendants, long after I am gone.
We are all more than a name on an ancestral tree of lineage.
Imagine, it’s the year 2060, and one of your descendants has just sat down to read one of your life stories.
What one story could they read to know how you lived, what passions consumed you or what events filled your days?
Start with just one life story.
Just one memoir
Just one.
In this way, a family legacy is born, affecting your family history, forever.
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I’m on the third year of my husband’s family tree and well over 3,000 ancestors recorded so far. Some roots are buried as deeply as 2,400 years, with a couple almost 3,000 years. None of his family have expressed any interest in his amazing family, which ties very closely to his families oral history. I don’t even think my husband has bothered to read it while I’m still work on researching, validation, and correcting it. I wish my own family had a tree that could be traced. Sadly it stops around 1880. Hopefully, one day, someone will care I took the time to do this work.
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May I say that I am totally overwhelmed with your diligence in tracking all those names. One woman I know traced her lineage only back 650 years, and I know the amount of researching that took her. I can understand your frustration that no one seems to care. Right now. When I first started, none of my children cared much either and now one son is keenly interested. More importantly, just imagine if I was one of your great- granddaughters, and I am given this treasure you have painstakingly compiled. I would have no way to thank you for all your work, but I would be ever so grateful. We do these ancestry stories not only for those of our immediate living family, but for those in the future who will benefit from our care and time to do it. One woman in my memoir writing group found the diary her grandmother wrote when she crossed the Atlantic and her first year in her new home. That diary, so rich in detail and emotion, inspired her to being writing her own life stories, short snippets of her life, not a diary per se. The woman who traced her family history back 650 years has now began to fill in those names with composing each one life story from the details she has learned,as well as writing her own short memoirs of her life story. The future holds many of your descendants who will honour and delight in having what you are doing today. They will value this gift as your legacy to them.
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Thank you. I don’t have my own children, but my husband has three that are now adults and on their own. I would have loved to have found a diary or something left by my grandparents. I do have the orginial patents for my grandfathers inventions, and my grandmothers newspapers article clippings. Oh my, we had so much in common. I had no idea she was such a modern woman, although born in the late 1800’s. My goal is to eventually fill in written and recorded stories of hubbies historic ancestors and how they shaped him and his closest relatives. I hope one day one of the kids will be able to take pride in knowing they are here today because their ancestors fought and survived the worst of lifes recorded hardships. (I wonder if they would be interested if they knew how many famous people they’re decended from, and how many they’re currently related to. The benefit of having thousands of ancestors and current ‘relatives’ lol) 🙂
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I read your post Leave no Trial. I love this line :”I time-traveled early 3,000 years into the past”. This is quite a process you are undertaking. Fascinating as well. While I have so little on my side, I also have a husband with more accessible family history to research. I agree with you that our ancestors and their choices have shaped those of us who live today.
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What I came to realize from the process is the amazing odds that we are even here today. With all the wars, pestilence, famines, genocides, high infant mortality, and early deaths the chance of survival was so slim. Yet here we are. That is what makes each of us amazing products of survial and resiliance.
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I love the idea of leaving a story behind. I tried to write my story but find it very difficult. My children know much of my story but just through stories that have been discussed.
I bet you have been good to leave your story. Have you kept a written memoir?
The wall of photos picture is so beautiful.
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That wall of photos is stunning, isn’t it. I wish I could say it is mine. I am slowly but surely accumulating snippets of my life story. I must say though Cheryl, that I have begun to focus on my life story once I had my children. I feel we are a repository for our children’s younger years, years they remember so little about due to their age. It is those stories especially that gain so much feedback from my lads. One of the older ones invariably remembers something else from that time, so I write it in. Many of us would have challenging life stories to write about when we were growing up. But, writing stories about raising our family, ah those are exceptionally wonderful to write and share with one’s children.
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We have a relative who researched and documented our family tree well back into the early 1700’s. Suddenly the family name disappeared. It took another two years, but the truth was learned. Because the sole era to the name married a house maid who was below the class of his social standings, he was disowned, and his name taken away. So he took the maden name of his wife. Luckily, someone in the church of England took pitty on him, and on his death certificate added, “alias” his given name. We all may have heart-warming stories like that in our past.
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This story is so fun, even though during the life of that relative, he was in disgrace. “Skeletons in the closet’ is of course what makes much of ancestry digging so challenging. But, there are many places, especially the churches, who kept rather detailed recorded of everything, as in that person who put down his ‘alias’. There is such a rich, and yes, slightly naughty story behind that relative’s face now, isn’t there. Thanks for sharing.
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Reblogged this on Observation Blogger and commented:
When I was ten years old, I decided to keep what I called a “memory folder”, a folder containing all those things I felt encapsulated those momentous occasions in my life. It included memorabilia such as newspaper clippings, awards and letters. Anything really that I felt was pertinent to understanding what I had done in my life.
. I used a simple cardboard folder with A4 plastic sleeves to add materials I saw as fitting; sometimes I discarded mementos that didn’t seem so poignant. In summary, I think keeping a memory folder is one of the most productive things I have done. It is such a significant yet simple activity and is one of my proudest achievements.
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What an amazing idea! I kept a lot of those things myself, scattered amongst my things, but in the frequent moving I did, they got lost. I don’t know how these things happen. I have friends who literally have boxes of keepsakes like this that they share at my memoir writing group. I am SO envious. Thanks for sharing this idea of keeping a simple memory folder. It’s an idea to share with every single person one meets, for we all have momentous occasions to commemorate and place in that folder, at every age and stage in life. Thanks for the re-blog as well.
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Hi Wendy. I loved your thought provoking post and why I wanted to reblog it. My mother has my memory folder stored in Australia. I currently live in Colombia. I’m looking forward to passing it onto my children when they are older. Cheers and I look forward to seeing more from your wonderful blog.
Matt K
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I started a Dad’s Legacy blog shortly after starting Older Eyes. It includes anecdotes, philosophical thoughts and a life story. So far, neither of my (grown) kids have shown much interest but maybe someday. I started it because by the time I really wanted to know my Dad’s story, he was to old to remember a lot of it. Maybe my grandkids will read it … and in writing it, I get to get some perspective on my life.
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What a terrific idea! This is exactly what I have been encouraging many of my friends to do with older parents. I know that it can be frustrating when grown children do not seem to interested, but I have experienced that lack of care and interest and just kept doing what I felt was important. Yes later, there they are, interested. Isn’t that often what we experience with children? We just do it and hope someday they will care. And funny enough, it is often the grandchildren who are most keen. I’ve written several stories and letters for my own sons. I so wish my own mother had done this for me, and I sincerely wish I could have enticed her to create them before she was gone. I couldn’t agree with you more than in writing, we gain not only perspective on life that has already happened, but perspective on what matters most now. Appreciate your thoughts here, and your blog as well.
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