Preserving your family legacy
Preserving your family legacy is fun, and rewarding. It may provide insight on questions you didn’t even know you had.
It’s all about the food!
Most of the recipes that you find here are from my grandmother’s recipe box. They are all either recipes she made often, or recipes from her friends and family. If you made something she loved, she always asked for the recipe afterwards!
Food is a great family tradition to keep handing down! Especially if it is really good! Someone might ask you, “oh where did you learn to make that?”, and you get to reply, “we’ve been making it in my family for generations!”. How cool is that!
Making a record
A great way to preserve your family legacy is to interview your family. Maybe you think you know your grandparents and your parents really well, but you only really know this version of them. The twenty or thirty (or whatever your age is), years you’ve been alive. They had a whole lifetime before that!
I “interviewed” my grandmother and my mother. I loved the answers I got, and it helped me get to know things about them I never knew before! It started conversations that made me feel like I really got to know them as the people they are, and were. Not just the grandmother I know now.
Save this information in a safe place, keep adding to it. What a wonderful gift to hand down! Instead of showing your kids, or grandkids, pictures of your family that, maybe by then, have passed on, you will now have so much more to share with them.
This will make the people that came before them feel more present and connected. As a wise man once said, each person is a product of the people that can before them. All of the skills and knowledge they have learned will be passed down to you, and you get to build on it! Find the Printable Version Here!
Forgotten Faces
A really important thing that is often overlooked is to label your pictures! I have so many pictures with these lovely people staring back at me, and I have no idea who they are! I don’t think I will ever be able to find out.
You have to remember that pictures often get passed down. Even though you may know who is in them, would your children or your grandchildren?
Heirlooms you will want to keep
Things that are precious to you will often be passed down. I am so lucky that people in my family were thoughtful enough to write things down.
My grandmother had packed away a box of things from her childhood, or young adult life, that was precious to her. With each thing she wrote a note.
For example, I have a sweet little child’s tea set. She wrote with it, that it was a tea set her and her siblings had gotten for Christmas one year. She had given examples of fun times they had shared with it. That tea set has so much more value to me now!
This black pearl and jet necklace. It was something that was originally her grandmother’s. Her mother, as a child had coveted it, and always asked to wear it on special occasions. She was never allowed to touch it!
When the mother had passed away, she left it to her. What a great story!
The Interview
I will leave you with the interview I had with my grandmother and some of her answers. If you would like to do the same, please feel free to use mine as a starting point and add questions of your own!
Childhood
- What was your favourite thing to do as a child? Playing outside on the farm with my brothers.
- What types of chores did you have when you were a child? I did the dishes and fed and cleaned the animals in the barn.
- Who was your first crush as a little girl? Danny Lewis. He had the same birthday as me and I was friends with his sister Debbie. We used to bale hay and pick cucumbers together.
- What is your favourite Christmas memory as a little girl? I had asked Santa for a new pair of shoes. On Christmas Eve I left my old ones out by the fireplace, upside down, so he could see my shoes had holes in them. On Christmas day, I had new shoes! I was so happy!
- Did you ever get in trouble at school? My friend and I got caught smoking in the basement of our school!
- What was a time you got in trouble with your parents? My friend and I skipped school when the fair was in town. We didn’t tell our parents. Someone even took our pictures and interviewed us at the fair, we thought it was so exciting! A few days later our pictures were on the front page of the newspaper, saying how the fair was so popular kids came to the fair instead of school that day. They even printed our names below the picture! So my parents, and everyone else, found out.
- A trip you took as a child? We didn’t go on many trips. I remember all of us loading into our horse carriage and driving all the way to the big city to buy a new set of plates. We went to a big store with a lot of fancy goods in it. It had an elevator operator!
Young Adult life
- Who was the first person you worked for? Paul, the tobacco grower.
- Your first date? Peter Gavin. We went to the lake and the truck got stuck in the sand.
- What was your favourite thing to do as a teen? Go to the movies with friends.
- What was your favourite thing to do as a young adult? My friend and I would catch the train into the city to go to dance. They had a live Big Band!
- Your celebrity crush? Frank Sinatra, old blue eyes.
- How much did you get paid for your first job. Tobacco picking was $12.50 a week and she thought Corn tasseling was $25.
- What was your first car? A Plymouth I called Bertha.
- Who taught you to drive? I am self-taught. My grandfather let me use his green car.
Other resources
If you are interested in diving deeper into your family’s past, there are so many great resources that are available online now! Many years ago I did https://www.ancestry.ca/, or https://www.ancestry.com/. Another popular site is https://www.23andme.com/. However, I have no experience with those sites.
Have you ever used any of these types of resources? Do you have any other great tips to share preserving your family legacy?
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