![]() Years ago, I participated in a gratefulness meditation, and I do not remember what happened at all. What is special about childhood memories is that we had very limited life experience to interpret them within their whole context.įor example, remembering an incident with our parents telling us off usually misses what our parents had to deal with at work, in their relationships, their history with their own parents, their fears and so on. Some remember what happened and others only remember what they felt about what happened. For some, the past is more vivid, while for others, it is vague and unclear. Some people find it hard to remember childhood experiences. It is funny that when I mention childhood memories, people go to the past and start digging. ![]() I did write “good childhood memories” in the original list of lists, but I think that the mere act of remembering, even if we recall some bad memories, helps our personal growth. In this post, I want to explain the importance of remembering. This lets us can enjoy them, appreciate them and be happy. ![]() Genealogy Gems Premium members can listen to Premium podcast episode 116, which has an interview with Laura Hedgecock, author of Memories of Me: A Complete Guide to Telling and Sharing the Stories of Your Life. ( Click hereto learn more about Premium membership.This series about list making revolves around the idea of using lists to examine our life and our perception and to highlight the good things in life. Our free Family History Made Easy podcast offers great episodes on topics related to this post: Lisa covers finding family history at home interviewing skills, and how to contact long-lost relatives (episodes 13 and 14). Who is living who knows something about your childhood? Parents? Step-parents? Grandparents? Aunts or uncles? Friends of the family? What family artifacts or albums may be in the attic, basement or on a shelf? Ask them to help give you back your own past!įamily History for Kids Starts WITH the Kids I typed up my own memories and put them in my own voice. My parents’ memories are tagged as such, as are excerpts from my baby book. The family historian in me made sure I identified the source of each story in the album. But taken together with everything else, they help reconstruct my childhood enough that I have a much better sense of it now. They are still fragmented some don’t make much sense or tell a whole story. My own vague childhood memories. All these pictures and memories jogged loose fragments of my own memories. These filled in more gaps in my childhood story.Ĥ. But there are a few gems in my baby book: my mom’s memories and memorabilia from when I was born. So Mom didn’t have a lot of time to write much down. My parents already had my 11-month old brother by the time I came along. ![]() They captioned the photos for me, filling in the stories behind the pictures.ģ. Different things came to mind for each of them, which was fantastic. As we looked at each picture–even the not-so-great ones–I asked what memories surfaced. I asked them to look through their CD of the family slides as I looked through my copy. One day, I got both my parents on the phone at the same time. My parents’ memories, captured in an oral history interview. My digital copies of the slides became the main narrative for the album.Ģ. Several years ago, I scanned all the slides. I grew up in the 1970s, when slide photography was all the rage (at least with my dad). I realized when looking through this album that I actually cobbled together the past from four different sources, only one of which was my own memory:ġ. That’s what I did in a scrapbook I put together a few years ago that reconstructs my early childhood. I’ve learned to use whatever scraps the past gives me. How can we tell our life’s story if we don’t remember the first chapter? Most of us don’t recall our early years well.
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