How to Tell Your Family Stories and Preserve Them

Our story begins, my friends, with me standing with my wife in front of a barn in the middle of nowhere. Ah, but my friends, you know me well enough to know that this nowhere is indeed somewhere. I am standing on the homestead of my great great grandfather in rural Ireland.

The house may be gone now, but I am looking at the same view that my great-great-grandfather saw over a century ago. And I am moved. My great-great-grandfather was a poor tenant farmer, one of thousands who farmed on the gigantic Coolattin estate, the mansion of which you can see below.

According to the Irish times, in its heyday, Coolattin House was at the center of one of the biggest and wealthiest Anglo-Irish estates. The owners, the Earls of Fitzwilliam, owned more than 85,000 acres and had thousands of tenants. After the Great Famine, thousands of tenant farmers just like my great-grandfather emigrated to North America, and that is why you have the privilege of reading my fabulous story here on this tiny screen, right before your tiny eyes. Below you will see a classic example of what his house probably looked like at the time. By the way, I am not the guy standing in the doorway, although the resemblance is of course uncanny.

One of the highlights of our dive into my family history was to tour a replica of the type of boat my great-grandfather probably took from Ireland over to North America.

I was stunned by how small it was and yet they pack so many people on board in tiny multi-tiered bunks like you see here:

I am super-grateful to my cousin, Kevin Lee, because he taught me the difference between the dry genealogy of birth and death dates or baptism certificates and the rich, vibrant life of family storytelling. Before Kevin taught me social history, my great great grandfather was just a birthdate and a location on a map for me. But after Kevin showed me the Coolattin Estate records, including a census which describes the residents in his house, the story of my great great grandfather came alive for me. This was especially so as I walked through the type of ship he probably travelled on. You see, my friends, it is not so much about the official details of my great great grandfather. Rather, I can know him more personally by learning about his life and times, rather than focusing on tiny objective details that chart his existence as if it were like a medical chart. (And if your ancestors come from County Wicklow Ireland like mine, chances are Kevin's book on the Coolattin estate will interest you too.)

So, while y'all were bingeing on Netflix, I spent all my free time during lockdown writing stories about my family--the kinds of stories I wish I had about my ancestors. To do this, I had to retrieve my own personal diaries from an old computer that crashed many years ago. Happily, I kept my injured hard drive all these years in a box in the garage. I finally found the courage to dust it off and send it to Brian Gill of Gillware, which is a data recovery company in Wisconsin. Brian is a fellow Irishman so he understands the power of storytelling and was very enthusiastic to help me recover my own life story and record it for my future grandchildren and great-great grandchildren.

As I get older, I become more aware of how recording my own experiences--both positive and negative--could be very helpful to future generations who read them. We all have our joys in life but also our suffering and our difficult lessons learned. I thought that if I could record some of my suffering and the wisdom I have gained from it, perhaps this would provide some comfort and wisdom to help my future generations learn from my mistakes rather than having to make them all over again. I had to get over my reluctance to share the bad times because of course, we all like to paint our lives as happy and drama free. But I know that, if my parents had kept a diary, I would have been thrilled to read it from cover-to-cover to understand what they really felt and how their perspective changed as they grew older and wiser. So I am investing in the future by attempting to tell the real story of my own life authentically. And this fine gentleman below helped me recover my diary so I could do just that!

The engineer part of my brain loves these photos that Brian sent me of his engineer taking apart my poor, tired old hard drive and attempting to breathe new life into it again. Notice the shamrock in the background--clearly fate brought me and Brian together!

Don't try this at home kids! As you can see above, there is a little bit of technology involved. Brian tells me that inside the chassis of the average old hard drive are 2-3 aluminum platters, and there’s a sputtered magnetic substrate on top of those shiny platters like the one pictured here. That magnetic "morse code" is physically the data. Gillware just needs that magnetically preserved data to be in pretty decent condition rather than all scratched up. His success rate on these vintage devices like mine is North of 95%.

OK. All right. So that description sounds clean, dry, and clinical until you see the stories that can burst forth from the magnetic imaging on those shiny platters. Look at this:

One of the gifts that Brian at Gillware gave me by retrieving my data is this photo of my grandfather: the son of the man who bravely left Ireland on that tiny, terrifying boat to give his family and future generations a better life. My grandfather was a homesteader and a successful farmer in western Canada. I have gazed many times at a close-up of his face in this photo, and I have researched the giant steam engine that stands behind him to know how much it cost and what he had to sacrifice to make progress in his chosen career. It is very moving for me to realize that he made all those sacrifices for his family and perhaps he did not think about me at the time, but I have received the benefits in comforts, education and character because of the sacrifices my grandfather made for his family. To me this story is an inspiration in my own life, when the inevitable hard times arrive. Below is my new friend Jason Harrison, who is one of the heroes of preserving these family stories for the benefit of our future generations.

Jason is a career genealogist and a fabulous storyteller. He specializes in weaving stories out of social history combined with the genealogical history of people's ancestors. Jason is helping me to tell my own life stories in a new way I had never imagined before. He inspired me to forget my intimidation by the dry and overwhelming data of genealogy. Before I met Jason, I found genealogy to be complex and boring, but he has opened my eyes to the stories lurking between those dry dates and documents. Now I can see the joy I will bring to the future generations of my family, simply by telling my own stories authentically: both the happy and the sad. I know that if I had been able to read the stories my grandparents did not want to tell me--the stories of their mistakes and their suffering--it would have brought me great comfort and reassurance in the difficult times I have suffered in my own life. If I hope to bring any comfort, wisdom, or sense of perspective to my own future generations, I will be proud to have helped in some small way.

Jason works at the FamilySearch Family History Library, which is a part of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City. One of the great gifts the Church gives our society is the tremendous network of genealogists and data centers that are now preserving the written family histories that currently lie in fading, decaying books sitting on shelves around the world. But they also are using cutting edge technology to preserve the audio and video files we now use to describe our lives on social media. FamilySearch goes deeper than the perfect, poser lives we like to depict on Instagram or Facebook. FamilySearch seeks to preserve the good news and the bad news of our lives; the good memories and the bad memories.

To tell our story authentically creates a sense of perspective for those of us living right now, but also gives our future generations a better sense of perspective about the lives they are leading. FamilySearch is helping us to remember that we are all a part of the river of life and the river of history, which hopefully will give us comfort during the difficult moments. I admire Jason and his work with FamilySearch, and I hope you will check out their website to see if this project speaks to you as much as it speaks to me.