October is Family History Month

 

Photo by Patrick Jones. Lovework at Culpeper, 17 Oct 2024.

October is designated as National Family History Month, officially named in 2001. Yesterday Ancestry's Crista Cowan led a virtual session on YouTube, focusing on Five Stories Every Family Should Tell. The talk is really interesting and has me thinking back to a post I shared last September, titled If your family story could be streaming.

The five stories described by Crista were:

1. The love story
2. The resilience story
3. The values story
4. The origin story
5. The identity story

Diving into these, she provided some examples. For the love story, tell how your parents met, or grandparents. Has a story of the marriage of a great or great-great-grandparent been passed down? Try to write that story down.

For the resilience story, try to document something an ancestor survived or did that made them stronger. I have written a lot about Agnes Atherton O'Brien, the actress in the family who overcame a childhood placed in the care of the Sisters of Charity in La Salle County, Illinois after the death of her mother around 1859. I've also shared the story of Nancy Jane Flatt, who delivered my 2nd-great-grandmother Mary Alice while she was a pauper in the Metcalfe County Poor House in 1878. Or the story of Guy Hankins, a cousin of my Gumpy who survived being shot down in World War II and being held as a prisoner of war for six months. We also have the amazing story, recalled from two perspectives, of my Gumpy, his brother and two cousins traveling from Indiana to California and back in the summer of 1937. There's so many more.

For the values story, Crista says, what did your people stand for, what religion did they follow, or careers, cultural practices or community involvement did they have.

On the origin story, this is "where did they come from," the immigration stories. Origin stories help build identity and belonging. I am lucky we have several immigration stories, on both my side and my wife's side of the family.

On the identity story, this is your own story, capturing "who am I in this family." Try to document more current aspects of your own history, as it may be interesting for your children, their children or grandchildren. I have done some of this with travels, and with photos.

The photo at the top of the post is a metal LOVE sculpture, taken at the Culpeper Amtrak Station in Downtown Culpeper, Virginia. This is a place I return to regularly for work as we have space in a data center in Culpeper. This town also was the home for the Read family, and the Thornhill line before they moved to Tennessee. I also have a deeper family connection to Culpeper through Germanna ancestors. More on that link in a future blog post.