How to Pass History Along

by Donna Swagerty Shreve

I started to get interested in my family’s history in the 1960s when I watched my mother delve into our background. My elders were talkers and shared their various stories at family gatherings over the years. I paid attention and was blessed with a good memory.

At first I bored my immediate family members with the stories I had heard on the many occasions during my childhood. My sons would say, “Yes Mom, we have heard that one before.” Finally my brother devised a solution to my many repeated tellings of the family stories. It was summer time when both of us had a few months off due to our careers in public education. He invited me up to his home in Redding. He told me to bring my stories and my computer.

After a week of non-stop typing, I had written down all of the various stories I could remember from past tellings. My brother printed them out on scratch paper and it was over 30 pages. While I was typing up stories, my brother set up a web site as an example for teachers in his district to promote various classroom activities. HIs idea was great but he got few takers. Instead we had the beginning of a family web site. As he continued his climb up his education career ladder, the web site was eventually taken down.

Not only did I have stories to tell but relatives started sharing pictures and artifacts with me as I had become the one who kept track of family history. I joined several genealogy societies and even took a week long trip to Salt Lake City to explore the wonderful library there. My various family trees were expanding in great leaps and it was suggested I write a book. I pushed back at that idea as I get that a book would never be up to date since I kept discovering new information. I had also watched one son lighten up each time he moved. Anything extra was quickly discarded. I had no illusion about how long any book I wrote would last in my immediate family.

Again, my brother came to the rescue. We decided it was time once again to create a web site. I had done a blog on my own in 2008 to chronicle a trip I took through the midwest as I traced the land owned by various relatives before everyone ended up in California. I wanted to bring along, via the blog, all of my cousins so they could share in my adventures. After I returned from the trip, I continued the blog with family stories. I took a series of writing classes to improve my skills My original intention was to clean up family stories of my ancestors, Soon my writing teacher convinced me to write my own stories as well. We all have stories to tell about our own lives. My collection of stories now needed a place to land.

Using what worked before, I traveled to visit my brother once again so we could launch another web site. We both did research into web sites and my brother chose one based on other people’s feedback on reliability and easy mechanics. He learned the basics and then taught me. It took several days but our new site was launched and we made many improvements to the original.

We gradually improved the site as the various needs arose. We have over 500 stories and they need to be organized. We put them into family groups first and then into chronological order within each family group. Family trees are expanding and have their own section. 

Artifacts have been recorded and are in their own section. Our family took many movies, thanks to my father. The videos, taken over the years are now available for all to enjoy. As I interviewed various family members, I tried to record each session to insure accuracy. The recordings also give that special gift of hearing a long-gone loved one’s voice. To help put various ancestors into perspective, individual time lines have been created and shared.

Finally, there is a section for blogs which is growing each week. As a Christmas present. my brother and his wife were given a service that gives them a weekly prompt. They send in an essay along with pictures and at the end of the year, all of the stories will be returned in a book. Those weekly stories are added each week to the blog.

What has happened with the blog is surprising. I have connected with relatives I was not aware existed or were even following us. There are also people who are following us from around the world that are not even related. We do have to pay an annual fee and we are on our second year’s subscription. Hopefully, the web site can continue after we are both gone. I also  hope there will be other contributors who continue our family stories and history. Check us out at swagertystories.com.

844 words

2020

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