My family’s history and story is of great concern to, so much so that I intend to reconstruct the family tree as far as I can get in order to know who came before me.
In this same sense, I put a lot a value into objects that have reached through the generations. I have china, some furniture, personal items, photos and photo albums, etc.
Everything tells a piece of a story I wasn’t able to fully live through and instead just brushed me growing up.
It gives me a sense of belonging.
I’ll be using the birth, marriage and death certificates my country issues to go beyonf my own memory. This will give me at least 75 years of reliable and easily accessible information. At some point, I’ll have to query my national library where such registries are kept for historical purposes.
There are a few things I want to put a rest to, like the story of an uncle, who alledgelly spent 18 years in prison and a supposed move of a branch of the family from one area to another in the country. Some 90 years or more in the past, it was uncommon.
The move 90 years ago I might actually believe. A great uncle of mine did basically the same thing, picked up a whole branch of the family and moved. After WWI they’d struggled to rebuild and he saw the start of WWII coming (although he didn’t realize how big it would be at the time). He moved just far enough to get a new start with people who didn’t know him before and went from there. I’ve seen others did the same before WWI seeing it coming.
Also around the 1850’s to 1960’s was the peak of cruise ships. It opened up movement a little more and people started realizing they could possibly relocate easier. That was also the tail end of railroad mania which caused a lot of that shuffling around of people.
Not in my country. Workers would travel around, even work away from home for months, but always returned home. There wasn’t much movement within the country and when the dictatorship settled in things just got harder. The country was mostly rural then and nearly every peasant had a peace of land to sow some potatoes, cabbage, turnips and onions, along with some vines for wine. Leaving that notion of security was very hard. Hence the strangeness of a branch of the family leaving their origin.