Geneology, I am doin' it....

So, most people know that I grew up LDS and was a devout LDS member through my freshman year of college. Having the large and amazing family I do and the strong values of the LDS faith instilled in me since I was a child, I have always been interested in family history. I worked together with my mom (mostly just copying her work) to put together our pedigree charts and family history as a teenager. I think we eventually got back about 18 generations!! It was a lot of fun...like a treasure hunt. I have always been one to love finding pieces of history and have always been inclined to leave pieces of my life for the future generations to find in their history searches.

I have always been a journal keeper. Since before I could write...mom wrote for me. I have them to this day. I am a scrapbooker. I keep photos and write detailed descriptions of events big and small. When we remodeled our kitchen I kept thinking how awesome it would be to find something from 1921 when the house was built to tell us about life then. So...I sat down and wrote a 6 page history of our family and what I knew about the house so far. I included a picture of us, put it all in an envelope and it's now between the wall and my corner cabinet in my new kitchen for the next generation to find. I write birthday letters to myself. It's true. Every year, I sit down and write myself a letter to open on my birthday the following year. I put lots of things in my letter. Hopes. Dreams. Accomplishments. Goals. Every year I find it amazing how much can happen in one year. It's beginning to slow down now that we are settled in a town and have a family and jobs, but things are just ever changing and for that reason, I look forward to my letter to myself every year. I hand write them and keep them in a file in my file cabinet. Once they are opened and read, I stick them back in the file and write the letter to myself for next year. On the 5-year birthdays (20, 25, 30, etc), I write one for 5 years later. I have two in my drawer right now. One for October 11th of this year when I turn 32 and one for the year I turn 35 that I wrote the year I turned 30. Some people may think this is silly, I enjoy it very much. :) I have started doing this for our son. I wrote several letters to him when I was pregnant and when he was a baby and am keeping them for him in his scrapbook for when he's an adult. History and learning about the past of family can be very fun.

This leads me to the reason for this thought. I was digging around in my basement the other day and I found the box of pedigree charts and family history papers that belonged to my mom in her search for her family history. There were letters and photos, birth certificates and marriage certificates. It was very fun to go through. Then, I struck gold...at least...what I consider gold. It's 76 pages of typed memories from my Great Grandpa Collins (on my mom's side). As far as I know, this is the only copy and it's a copy of the original. I have decided to type it out to allow me to have an electronic copy of such a treasure. I started just a few days ago and I have to say it's been SO fun to learn more about him.

I knew my great-grandparents well. I think I am unique in that way as I am sure that there are many people who have never met theirs. Great Grandma Collins taught me to play piano in her basement. Grandpa let me watch him build his doll houses and work in his garden. I can smell their house in Everett, Washington as I sit here typing. Grandma has been gone a long time now and Grandpa died a few short years ago having lived a very full life. I did get time with them both, especially great grandpa and I am very grateful for that.

His memory writings are just that. He doesn't seem to connect his paragraphs with any one thought. It's as if he wandered in to the type writer (or rather dictated to grandma as he didn't have a thumb...) and "jotted down" the memory that he was thinking of at the moment. One paragraph will be of swimming in the canal in the summertime and the very next one will be about the quarantines that were put on their house when he was very young. The following paragraph will be stories of he and his siblings and the next about winter in North Pocatello where his school was 3 miles away from their house.

I plan to transcribe every word directly as written and then attempt to put it together in sections. I am not sure there is enough information provided for me to do a chronological organization (although, I could probably map it out pretty closely based on what I know of his life already), but maybe themes or chapters. Or...maybe I'll just leave it exactly how it is and double space each paragraph so they can stand on their own as memories pure and simple.

I knew a lot about my great grandfather when I started this project, but I learn more and more every time I sit down and start transcribing. I knew he was a fire fighter as an adult, but I didn't know that as a young boy he and his friends and brothers blew up everything they could get their hands on. :) I knew he loved dogs and they had one when I was little (Missy), but I didn't know that he had the same breed of dog growing up and was VERY attached to that animal. I knew he had a compassionate heart and a loving tone, but I didn't quite know the extent. He sat and told me story after story about the trouble he'd caused as a young adult, but he didn't mention smoking behind the barn as a kid..... :) (hehehe...your secret's out grandpa, and if you were around....I'd be giving you a good deal of grief about it.....)

It's been a fun project. I guess I am just kind of nostalgic. I spent this past weekend with my grandparents on my dad's side. I was planning a visit to see them and my aunt and uncle and cousins that happened to coincide with a surgery grandpa was trying to keep secret. So...I went anyway and kept grandma company. Grandpa is home and just about as good as new and I learned a lot in my time with my grandma Donna. She has been losing her short term memory for quite some time now, but it's starting to get pretty bad. She'll have what my uncle Tim calls her "daily mantra" that she gets fixated on throughout the day until something (undetermined) gets her mind to move on to something else. I heard a number of fun stories and it got me thinking that I REALLY wish I had had a voice recorder with me so that I could capture some of those stories for the rest of the family and for posterity. I think this is something I would like to look into. I have a friend who often does oral interviews of family and friends and then transcribes them. Especially with the generational gap that we have in our society, I think it's most important that we remember and treasure the way things used to be. They lived through World Wars, the great depression. They experienced life without TV or computers. They washed their clothes by hand and from the stories that I have heard and read it took ALL DAY LONG!! My really old and cranky washer is done in about 20 minutes and I don't even have to be home! My great grandpa Collins and his friends had experiences as kids that my son will never have because in our world, it's not safe for me to let him out to ride his bike even down the block without being out there to watch him. My great grandfather and his generation grew up with each other. They had social bonds that were so tight, we can't even imagine them today. They had free roam and true adventure!

It's been fun to read and fun to learn and I'm excited to keep going. For now, I will share one excerpt and I'm sure I'll be back as I think on this wonderful treasure I found in my family history!

"There were no schools near our place so we had to walk about three miles to get to school. This was not bad but at times we did have some problems, especially during the winter. I remember that when the snow was deep, that the older kids had to go ahead and break a path for us younger ones. When the snow was three or four feet deep it did present us smaller kids with a problem. Later on they built a two room school about a block from our place where all six grades met in these two rooms. This lasted until they built a new brick school about a mile from our place and each grade had a separate room. I had a hang-up about going to the toilet while at school. Because of this I would hold it until I got home. Sometimes I really had to run fast and hope the bathroom was clear. This was a stupid hang-up, but that is the way it was and I always made it just in time. That is all but once."--Great Grandpa Collins.