I'm still lost in pages of family history...still following those little green leaves on Wayne's ancestors, too. We're blessed that we had a lot, and I do mean a lot of information to start with plus this isn't our first trip down the genealogy path. On some lines we can go back nine or ten generations and one even more than that. When you consider that the number of direct ancestors in that line doubles every generation, that makes for a lot of people to look at.
A few blanks are being filled in but mostly I'm looking for documentation onthe information that we have. Sometimes that comes in the form of public records, like a census or marriage record...those aren't too exciting. But I've been in the books too, and then it gets interesting because that's where you find the stories. Like this one about the death of Wayne's fifth great-grandfather, Roland McReynolds, as conveyed by his cousin Benjamin:
"The most of my uncle's sons became professors, but with me it is a very doubtful case whether any of them were professors of true religion. The whole of them indulged too much in the use of spirituous liguors. Roland, whose name I forgot to insert in the carelogue of his children's names, although a member, and if my memory serves me right, an Elder in the Presbyterian church, having drank too much whisky, wandered out of his path, on his way from the store home, and was found next day dead and frozen, with his jug with a little whisky in it sitting beside him. He was father of our friend, Leonard McReynolds, the Shaker." (misspellings all in the original)
Poor Roland. He was, however, 75 at the time which was a pretty ripe old age for the late 1700's.
Reading this and the other stories about the McReynolds line got me to thinking What stories will be have to leave future generations? I'm finding what I'm finding because someone wanted to record their ancestors' journeys to new territories or the history of the settlement of a new county or state; we don't have much of that now. What frontiers are we going to find that will make our lives interesting to those who come after us?
I'd like to think the scrapbooks I've made are at least a partial answer to that question but then I think of poor Roland. None of us are going to include stories like his in our scrapbooks; details like that would be swept under the rug in many families, not recorded for posterity. And yet they make a connection to a faceless ancestor possible.
I guess I worry that in a day and age when photos live on cellphones and computers instead of albums and boxes and communications between families come via email and Facebook instead of letters and cards that the stories will get lost. And that makes me sad because the stories are one of the best parts.
So here's my challenge: Next time your extended family gets together, tell some stories. They can be about your childhood or you can ask your parents or grandparents to tell some from their childhood...it doesn't matter. Then find a way to record them, even if it's just you going home and typing them up in a Word document. If you tell different stories every time you get together, pretty soon you'll have your own history book for future generations. Hopefully you won't have any sad but funny stories of relatives meeting their demise with a jug of whiskey at their side but if you do, you do. You can't change history but you can record it. Thanks to that story we have a better picture of Roland that we got from a deed or census record, and so will you from your stories whatever they may be. Future generations will thank you, I know.
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