| I have solicited from my oldest living relatives their memories of relatives long since dead. I never knew my father's mother — she died before I was born. But my father and his sisters have given me their recollections (such as they can in an email or whatever). I have also pursued stories from my oldest aunt, my father of course, my mother. I have taken many of these down and put together a genealogy book with photos, birth, death .. those sorts of factual things you find when researching. But also the stories from my father, aunts. And photos that I painstakingly scanned in, retouched. Thanks to the tech of today and a modest investment I was able to have printed over a dozen of these hard-bound books and have shared them with aunts, siblings, cousins, neices, nephews, daughters.... I have done what I could. And yet, I too kick myself for having not talked to Aunt Faye before she died in 2001. I was in my 30's and she had passed the 100 year mark in her life. What stories she could have told. And my grandfather who died a few years after I graduated from college. You do what you can when you can. I just wish I had cared about my larger family earlier in my life. |