Chapter 10: Family History
Write Your Life Story for Posterity - Save Your Family History
This is the tenth newsletter in the A Journey of a Thousand Miles… series.
By Maureen Santini © Copyright 2017-2025. All Rights Reserved.
This is the most important newsletter in the A Journey of a Thousand Miles… series.
Why? Because without a concerted effort to protect it, family history slips away slowly, without awareness, until it’s gone forever.
Suddenly, one by one, there’s no one left who remembers.
The intent of Chapter 10 is to save your family’s history from destruction. Preserving your knowledge of your life and times is important but doing the same for everyone in your family is exponentially more important.
Some of you may think, “I don’t know much about my family’s history.”
But you do. Whether you realize it or not, you have in your memory bank valuable knowledge about your siblings, parents, grandparents, perhaps great-grandparents, as well aunts, uncles, and cousins.
For that matter, you know things about your children, especially when they were young, that will surprise and maybe even delight them.
You know the personal side: their personalities, lifestyles, quirks, hobbies, politics, jobs, prized possessions, pet peeves, famous sayings, triumphs, disappointments and much more.
Such irreplaceable information is absent from public record research. You are the sole custodian of this kind of knowledge.
By writing down the personal side of your family members, you can preserve an entire generation’s worth of valuable information that would otherwise wind up in the trash can.
Start with the people you know best, presumably parents, siblings, and your children. Then move on to grandparents, great-grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins as detailed below.
Write a few paragraphs or more encapsulating everything you know about each person. Then add anything that falls under the category of “Remember the time when …”
If you prefer a structured guide, use the prompts in the Chapter 1 through 9 newsletters to answer questions, this time not about you, but about various family members. You’ll soon discover how much you know.
Interview Family Members
For best results, interview surviving family members. Ask questions about their lives and experiences but also find out what they know about their grandparents and great-grandparents. Go back in time as far as you can.
The best family histories are those in which several family members write about their lives. Consider asking family members to join you by setting aside a night every week to write.
Basic Information
In addition to the personality-type information mentioned above, examples of information to preserve:
Dates, places, and circumstances of the person's birth, marriage, and death.
Details about education and military experience.
Names and dates of births of children.
Addresses of residences.
Jobs, including military service.
Nationality, country of origin and date and method of emigration.
Hobbies, skills, and interests.
Family rituals, values, and activities.
Names of people and places frequently visited.
Opinions regarding social issues, politics, and anything else they were passionate about.
Status of health and welfare throughout the decades.
The goal is to create a permanent record for current and future generations. Your descendants will be happy you did.
Why bother? What difference does it make if anyone remembers anything about you or your family in a century or even a few decades?
It is difficult to overstate the degree to which family history provides connections.
Knowing their family history gives children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and future generations the security of knowing where they are from, who their people were, what those people represented, and what kind of family legacy they inherited.
Conclusion
An incalculable loss of knowledge occurs when people die without passing down their life stories and accumulated wealth of knowledge. The Decade method is designed to preserve irreplaceable information about everyone in your family for the benefit of all.
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The final chapter, Chapter 11, Summary, will be published Friday.
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Maureen Santini is a writer, researcher, and former journalist whose goal is to prevent the accumulated knowledge and life stories of millions from ending up in the dustbin of history.
To inspire others to write their stories, endorse the Decade method and click the restack symbol below.