It is a new year and time to think about what we want to accomplish in this new beginning. I like to play games but mostly the games are a means to an end. Perhaps it is a way of sitting down with family and relaxing or filling in some spare time with friends.
The game I have been involved in for many years is a game where you start with yourself and go backwards. It is the family history game and the rules are both simple and complicated. It might start off with a phone call to an older cousin and during the course of the conversation she mentions a homestead in Ontario where her mother and my father were raised. After the call, I get out a map of Ontario and try to find Sebright on the map - I finally remember a very old map that I bought at an auction. There it is, or should I say was? Many small villages are gone now or have been assimilated into the nearest city.
On my mother’s side of the family, a second cousin phoned to ask me if he could look at my records and bring his own. We bantered back and forth with names we had heard all our lives and not only names but stories about the aunts and uncles we shared. With the ones we knew, each of us seemed to have a different view of their personalities Was Auntie M. really a funny lady or did she use her Irish lilt to cover up for all the sorrows in her life? Was uncle B. a stoic man who never laughed or had he just been brought up to take everything seriously?
When you first start to look into family history and write it down. -You find you don’t know where to start. What I did was sit down with my mother and I took out a sheet of manila board with circles drawn on it. On each circle was the name of a husband and wife. Radiating out from that first circle were the couple’s children, who they married and the names of their children. I started with my husband and myself and then directly below the finished circle were my parents, their children, and theirs. This was also done on my husband’s side of the family. Then below that there were two circles for both sets of grandparents and their entire families.
This might sound complicated but that far it is very simple if your parents are alive - if not, it gets to be a more serious game involving finding marriage, birth and death certificates.
The part of the game that is the most fun, is finding out the stories of those lives - what did they do for a living? What their likes and dislikes were -then you start to see the real people. This part of the game involves aunts, uncles, cousins and second cousins.
Family history is a great game that has great rewards and a few laughs and a few tears.