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Memories are worth preserving
Family members offer a vast array of unique stories
By Angie Borgedalen
While I was out and about recently, a man said to me: “Since Mother’s Day is coming up, you really need to write a story encouraging people to interview their older relatives.”
Hmmm. He’s right. And not only for Mother’s Day, but whenever the family is gathered for special events or just for Sunday dinner. Every family has stories to tell and to hand down from one generation to the next.
Somehow plans to record Grandma and Grandpa or Aunt Betty or Uncle Ralph seem to go by the wayside and you promise yourself you’ll do it next time. Then something happens and it is too late.
I kept meaning to ask my mother where her grandparents and great-grandparents were born and to write the information down in case I ever decided to do a family genealogy. Well, at 92 and on her deathbed I asked her and she said, “I don’t remember.” Since all of her siblings were gone, they weren’t around to ask either.
My own grandparents were gone by the time I was a young adult, and it did not occur to me at the time to write down their memories during all the summers I spent at their farm. Of course, I’m sorry now.
However, I did do something right in this regard. Once when my daughter and her husband owned a second home in Vail, Colo., we took my mother and an uncle up there for a few days. Since they were both in their 80s at the time, mountain climbing was not an option.
So one afternoon, I poured them each a shot of whiskey and whipped out my tape recorder. At first they were a little shy but as the sipping whiskey loosened their inhibitions, I learned more about their lives growing up on adjoining farms in New Mexico. My uncle Chris was born in 1910 and my mother in 1911, the year before New Mexico became a state.
It seems my uncle, who died at 96 last year, was at one time my mother’s boyfriend. That was before he dumped her and ran off with her older sister, who left her first husband and dropped off her toddler son for my grandparents to rear. For years my cousin Ernesto thought my uncle Arsenio was his brother, when he was really his uncle.
I learned from my cousin last year that my aunt had another child while my uncle was fighting in World War II and gave him up for adoption, but by now my mother was gone and I had nobody to ask about this family scandal. Nobody tells kids anything, no matter how old they are.
After her father’s funeral, my cousin, who is five years younger than I am, showed me letters that told that my aunt’s sister (my mother, we figured) had accompanied her to the birth of the child. I had also learned earlier that my brother, who died at age 2, was not my father’s son.
While I suspect that those doing the interviewing are not going to find out any juicy gossip like that at a family dinner, you could find out what life was like for their grandparents. Make sure to ask when and where they were born.
Even if your grandfather was shot in a bar fight over a hussy, it makes for a colorful family story to tell way in the future, after all the culprits are dead.
Liberty Editor Angie Anaya Borgedalen can be reached at 781-4941 or aborgedalen@npgco.com.
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Hmmm. He’s right. And not only for Mother’s Day, but whenever the family is gathered for special events or just for Sunday dinner. Every family has stories to tell and to hand down from one generation to the next.
Somehow plans to record Grandma and Grandpa or Aunt Betty or Uncle Ralph seem to go by the wayside and you promise yourself you’ll do it next time. Then something happens and it is too late.
I kept meaning to ask my mother where her grandparents and great-grandparents were born and to write the information down in case I ever decided to do a family genealogy. Well, at 92 and on her deathbed I asked her and she said, “I don’t remember.” Since all of her siblings were gone, they weren’t around to ask either.
My own grandparents were gone by the time I was a young adult, and it did not occur to me at the time to write down their memories during all the summers I spent at their farm. Of course, I’m sorry now.
However, I did do something right in this regard. Once when my daughter and her husband owned a second home in Vail, Colo., we took my mother and an uncle up there for a few days. Since they were both in their 80s at the time, mountain climbing was not an option.
So one afternoon, I poured them each a shot of whiskey and whipped out my tape recorder. At first they were a little shy but as the sipping whiskey loosened their inhibitions, I learned more about their lives growing up on adjoining farms in New Mexico. My uncle Chris was born in 1910 and my mother in 1911, the year before New Mexico became a state.
It seems my uncle, who died at 96 last year, was at one time my mother’s boyfriend. That was before he dumped her and ran off with her older sister, who left her first husband and dropped off her toddler son for my grandparents to rear. For years my cousin Ernesto thought my uncle Arsenio was his brother, when he was really his uncle.
I learned from my cousin last year that my aunt had another child while my uncle was fighting in World War II and gave him up for adoption, but by now my mother was gone and I had nobody to ask about this family scandal. Nobody tells kids anything, no matter how old they are.
After her father’s funeral, my cousin, who is five years younger than I am, showed me letters that told that my aunt’s sister (my mother, we figured) had accompanied her to the birth of the child. I had also learned earlier that my brother, who died at age 2, was not my father’s son.
While I suspect that those doing the interviewing are not going to find out any juicy gossip like that at a family dinner, you could find out what life was like for their grandparents. Make sure to ask when and where they were born.
Even if your grandfather was shot in a bar fight over a hussy, it makes for a colorful family story to tell way in the future, after all the culprits are dead.
Liberty Editor Angie Anaya Borgedalen can be reached at 781-4941 or aborgedalen@npgco.com.