A thimbleful of detail about your life this Tuesday can be a jewel if preserved for your great-great-great grandchild or grand nephew. In 1898 my great-great grandmother, Editha West Shrum, sat down and wrote four letters to her nieces and nephews. When I found the letters through my family research they made Editha a person to me. They told me worlds about how she thought, joked, spoke and spent her day. Writing letters was a challenge and delight to her.
"Dear niece and family, I set down to rite you fiew lines to let you know we are still on the land of the living and can all still come to the table. As long as we can do that we need not get scared. Well, we have been sick but all are better. Well I guess you began to think we was never a going to rite. It looks like a big job to rite a letter, but I guess geting at it is the worst part, this is my fourth today". You can see Editha too, can't you? Putting down her farmhouse work, maybe brushing the flour off her apron and sitting down to write. With what? Pencil, nibbed pen and pot of ink? Rainy day? Snow? It was Ground Hogs Day. Did the creature see his shadow that year?
Imagine your descendant, 113 years from now reading some of your email posts, resumes, journal entries, or the picture your child drew today. In the mid-1980s I was working on an urban homesteading (voluntary building rehab) project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. When I whacked into an old plaster wall with my wrecking bar and pulled away the baseboards to dismantle the wall, I found an old slip of paper. It was a grocery shopping list. Thirty cents for turnips and potatoes, sixty cents for a jug of beer, 10 cents for flour... What a find that was for me. It gave the room a different light. The name of a man with a German surname was on the front of the paper. It was a rent receipt from 1913. I could smell the turnips cooking, wonder what factory or shop he worked in. I got the idea he was a single man, living in the German Town of the period. I knew him then, just a little bit.
When we save information for the people of the future, it links them to us and us to them. Your 2121 descendants might like you a lot or not so much. I love Editha, but William Capps, my Jamestown ancestor, doesn’t strike me as someone I’d like to spend much time with; sour old complaining sort. But whatever we think of ancestors or future generations think of us, the threads of connectedness baste together the ages and both history and the future are
No comments:
Post a Comment