Family Stories

This week I was lucky to have a chance to help a family write a little bit of their family history and put it into a booklet with pictures. We are so lucky to have the simple tools to do something so heartwarming.

My computer is fairly up-to-date. I have a nice inkjet printer and a good scanner. I can type a story and insert photos, drawings and maps very quickly. Then I can just print it out and the story can then be copied on a black and white or a color copier if additional copies are needed.

I enjoy this process because I have an opportunity to read the stories of our elders and try to apply their experiences to my own life. I feel that it is important for every family to have a history to hand down.

The story I read this week was about the early working days of a resident of Shell Lake. He traveled across the midwest looking for work when he was a young man. No doubt the experience was miserable, but he learned the hard truth about the value of hard labor. If you have never been miserable or had extreme pain, how can you quantify how much you can take in life?

Imagine the fear he experienced lost in the snowy forest at night without the handy tools we have now, just a gun and youth to sustain him. I tried to empathize with his trip out west where he and his friends searched for work. I can't imagine working picking potatoes for three cents a bushel and arguing over a half cent more. I have picked potatoes and I have worked in the fields so I clearly remember sunburns, windburns and sore aching muscles. I do not want to do that again.

How can we use this history as a corollary to our experiences today? It is not that pain and hardship is good in itself, but that it teaches us what only experience can give. Our children cannot learn from our relation of experience. If history is correct, we learn the best lessons by living the experience. The corollary therefore is that hard work is a good teacher.

Do you have stories that you think would help people develop a good life attitude? Could you share those stories in verbal form or in written form with others? I think that there is a huge loss to our society when one-to-one communication is replaced with learning from the pretend world of movies and the fake world of magazines and television. History tells us that we need to maintain communication between people of all ages and backgrounds if we want to survive.