Ask Your Family Their Stories

Grandma Ruth in red & Great-Grandma Hattie in blue.

Many of us are getting ready to spend time with our families for whatever holidays we celebrate. This is a perfect opportunity to ask your elders questions about their childhoods, their parents, their grandparents, or any family stories they remember hearing. 

Where were they born? What was their first job? What was their favorite childhood book? Where is their favorite place in nature? Did they have a signature food dish? Known hobbies?

Who were their heroes? Did they travel? How much school did they do? What did they dream of being when they were kids? 

What do you want to know?

Even better, make a list of the questions you have, slap a fancy holiday image at the top and hand them out to your family. Take videos of them answering some of the questions. Make it communal.

Doing my genealogy as an adult and getting more context for names I heard bandied about as a kid, I realize all the moments I didn't pay attention to. I mean, we all do that. Kids aren't supposed to pay attention to that stuff. And they're not going to pay attention to boring grown-up talk unless we lend sacred weight to; there are ways to ritualize storytelling.

I'm trying to learn that.

I never met my paternal grandma Ruth Emma Ruston. She died at 42 of cervical cancer. (That's a year younger than I am now.) She’s the woman in the photo, in the red dress, at a family function shortly before she went back to the hospital for more treatment. When my dad showed me this picture, he got choked up. I’d never seen it before.

He doesn't remember that day. He was only five. But he'd been told a story that he shared with me.

When Ruth was 42 she had four children. The oldest was 19 and my dad was the youngest. He said that Grandma Ruth went to an afternoon function in that dress because it was her favorite. She knew she wasn't coming back from the hospital and that red dress was her favorite. And I fucking love that.

My dad asked his older brother, an adult when she died, if he had any special recollections about her. We didn't expect him to sit down and write down as much as he could recall. I cried reading through it. If my father had never asked, I wouldn’t know.

I feel like I know her better now. She was clever and inventive and creative about finding ways to run her household that positively affected her community. She loved her family fiercely for as long as she could.

Think about what you want to know and ask your questions this holiday. You won’t always get answers but you might just learn more than you expected. You might learn a small detail that helps you unlock another level of your genealogy work, but you’ll definitely make more family memories in the sharing.