On Being a Better Ancestor - Memories

“Tell me about the olden days.” I can remember asking my parents to tell me what life was like when they were young. But now they are gone, and there are so many more questions I would like to ask.

Preserving memories is an important aspect of being a good ancestor. One of the methods that can be used is to write about them in blog posts. There are many resources available to use as writing prompts. Here are just a few:

• Lorine McGinnis Schulze of the Olive Tree Genealogy Blog has a weekly series called Sharing Memories: A Genealogy Journey.
• Amy Coffin of The We Tree Genealogy Blog has 52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy & History prompts published each week at Geneabloggers.com
• Legacy Family Tree, as part of its genealogical software program, has an “interview questions report.”

I must confess I intended to start doing this at the beginning of the year, using Amy Coffin’s series. But I haven’t....and now must catch up! My plan is to write 7 posts per week including the prompt for the current week and several from previous weeks until I am back on track.

I’ve created a blog just for these posts—52 Weeks of Personal History—and published three posts. The posts are “dated” according to the week when the prompt was originally scheduled to be written. Once the year is over, my goal is to publish a “blog book” that can become part of my genealogy legacy.

© 2011 Denise Spurlock, Ancestral Trees Research