Personal First Hand Research–in Your Own Family!

Your family is the best source of personal research.

Start with the simple ones first: “Tell me a story.”

Out of the past can come amazing tales that not only are true but are pertinent to you.

If your family remembers them, they probably reverberate with emotion, too.

(And if someone claims to have no memory of their childhood, I let it go. “Tell me a happy story,” I suggest instead).

Family horrors are never forgotten

My grandmother’s aunt died years before her 1905 birth.

Lettie was two-years-old when she climbed onto the mantle and ate the rat poison.

I can’t imagine my great-great-grandmother’s horror watching her toddler’s writhing death with blood pouring . . . well, from everywhere

(Which is why poisons are locked up at my house, The mere mention of “rat poison” makes me shudder

First hand stories can provide an immediacy about current events “unpolluted” by later writers trying to tell the story.

It’s a particular challenge for modern writers to put themselves into the mental mindset of those who lived long ago, without interjecting some of their own attitudes.

What about the start of World War II?

My father, for example, was ten years old at the start of World War II.  He described the start of the war for an oral history project.

 “We were at the movies in Fresno, California. Boys were selling papers and shouting about the Japs. We didn’t know what it meant and were scared. Would we be bombed in Fresno just like they were in Honolulu?”

He ran to the newspaper office and got papers of his own to sell. They went quickly.

With some of his first earnings, my father purchased an atlas. Using pencil, he plotted the course of the war in Europe.

My brother still has that beaten up green-cloth-covered atlas with dog-eared pages and place names written in cramped print.

The European maps slip out easily because my father spent so much studying them. You can see Dad’s pencil lines for, among other things, the Battle of the Bulge.

I think about my father in 1943, a lanky twelve year-old sprawled on the rag rug listening to the radio news.

For all he knew, airplanes with the rising sun on their wings flew to bomb him. So, he participated in war drives and watched over his siblings when my grandmother went to work at an aircraft factory.

“We didn’t know until the end if we’d be speaking English or German.”

How far back does your family history go?

My maternal grandfather lived to be 103.

Queen Victoria sat on the British throne while Thomas Edison still tinkered with electricity applications at his birth.

Born in 1890, he witnessed an astonishing period of history.

Grandpa lived long enough to see personal computers and men walking on the moon.

I asked when he saw his first airplane.

“In Chicago. It was the Wright brothers‘ plane on display at the museum.”

I didn’t know the plane was exhibited in museums. I’m not even sure I knew it had survived the 1903 take off!

Living history–in my own family.

And first hand at that!

Have you interviewed people about events they witnessed?

If you’re old enough, do you remember when you first heard President Kennedy had been shot?

Where were you on September 11, 2001?

Has your story changed since the event? 🙂