The Living Archives
Grandparents Day was two days ago. I want to talk about the people who are still here and what we stand to lose if we don't ask the right questions while we can.
OPENING NOTE
There is a specific feeling that comes with realizing you didn't ask someone something while you still had the chance. I know that feeling. Most people who do genealogy research know it intimately. This issue is for anyone who still has time to avoid it.
MAIN PIECE
Every archive has a closing time. The courthouse, the library, the historical society, they all close at some point, and you go home and come back when they reopen. The archive that lives in an elderly relative's memory has a different kind of closing time, and you can't come back once it closes.
I have spent more than four decades working with official records. Censuses, vital records, land deeds, military files, church registers, newspaper archives. These documents are irreplaceable, and I have enormous respect for the institutions that preserve them. But I have also learned that the most detailed, most specific, most humanizing information I have ever found about any family is not in any official record. It came from conversations. From sitting with someone who remembered something that was never written down anywhere, and asking the right questions, and listening carefully to the answer.
The question I get most often from people starting family history research is: where do I begin? My answer is almost always the same. Begin with the people who are still alive. Start there first, before you touch a database, order a record, or subscribe to a genealogy platform. The records will still be there next month. The people won't necessarily be.
What do you ask? Not just the names and dates, though those matter. Ask about the texture of life. What did the house smell like? What did your grandmother cook for company versus what she cooked on a regular Tuesday? Who in the family didn't speak to whom, and why. What was the thing nobody talked about? What was the story that got told at every family gathering? What did your grandfather do when he thought no one was watching? These details don't show up in a census. They don't appear in a death certificate. They exist only in the memory of someone who was there, and when that person is gone, they go with them.
I want to be honest about something: this kind of interviewing is not always comfortable. Family histories are not uniformly pleasant. There are silences that are silences for a reason -- things that were too painful to talk about, things that carried shame or complicated the family narrative in ways that made them easier to leave undisturbed. You will encounter those silences. You don't have to force your way through them. But you do need to know they exist and to note them, because the silences in a family history are as informative as what gets spoken.
Hispanic Heritage Month begins today, and I want to note its relevance here. Louisiana's Spanish colonial period produced some of the richest genealogical records in the region, and the Latino and Caribbean families whose histories are woven into this state's fabric have their own complicated relationship with official documentation and family memory. The principle is the same across every lineage: the people who remember are irreplaceable, and time is always moving in one direction.
If you have someone in your family who is carrying information that exists nowhere else, please make the call. Record the conversation if they'll allow it. Take notes if they won't. Ask the questions you've been meaning to ask. Do it before the next family gathering becomes the occasion where everyone agrees you should have done it sooner.
CLOSING TAKEAWAY
The archive isn't only in the courthouse. Sometimes it's sitting at a kitchen table, and it has a closing time that nobody announces in advance.
WORTH NOTING
StoryCorps has a free app that makes it easier to record and preserve family conversations: storycorps.org. The oral history methodology developed at Columbia University's Oral History Research Office is also worth knowing about if you want to approach these conversations with more structure: oralhistory.columbia.edu.
Kelly Howard
Founder and CEO, Vysyons Communications
KWBHoward@VysyonsCommunications.com
More on genealogy research support at https://www.vysyonscommunications.com/services/heritage-and-legacy