Michelle Obama in her recent biography “Becoming” talks about the importance of knowing her story. She writes of her parents:

“Together they helped me see the value in our story, in my story, in the larger story of our country. Even when it is not pretty or perfect and when it’s more real than you want it to be. Your story is what you have. What you will always have. It’s something to own.”

While knowing our story might seem like “dwelling on the past”, this does not have to be the case. The good thing about a story is that is still being written. We still get to write the next chapter. We get to create.

Creating our lives

Capturing your family’s story year-by-year can create a greater sense of this “process of creation”. This can be empowering. What are our thoughts about “who we are” and for that matter “who we are not”? What does your family value? This sense of creating our lives as we capture our story is empowering. By “telling it as we go” we can get a sense of our families being a “work in progress”.

A “digital shoebox”

A columnist for the Weekend Australian magazine, Bernard Salt, often reflects on his family’s story. He talks of the “digital shoebox”. He writes:

 “I realised that following the introduction of digital cameras in the early 2000s we were in danger of losing continuity of our family’s photographic record. Not for want of picture-taking, or the cost of photography, but because of the number of images.”

He talks of the difficulty in retrieving and filtering these images to store important pictures. He worries that by about 2030, the family photographic record will more or less cease to exist beyond say, 2003, save for “the odd pic that for some reason was printed.” Interestingly he writes:

 “The value of an old-style album is that it showcased life’s best bits. What joy it gives grandparents and grandchildren, to peruse an old photo album together and see the lives, the fashion; who was in the family circle ‘back then’.”

A few years back, I recently had my old collection of about 100 family slides converted to digital images to celebrate my mother’s birthday. As a child, I always used to love “slide nights” as we would call it, when we would together as a family pull out the old slide projector and look at the slides. Sitting in the lounge of her nursing home, we together again watched the images on a large television screen. I enjoyed seeing myself as a child. Being one of eight kids, it often felt like there were not too many images with me in them, but as an adult, there were plenty enough. Enough to bring back the memories of beach holidays, of Christmas time, of playing in our front yard, as well as sitting in a jalopy seat in the back of our large station-wagon. I could still hear the arguing about who would get to sit near the window!

But as lovely as it was to look through these 100 images, I have been able to make these images even made more accessible by being even more selective as I captured my family’s story in the pages of my own family album. For me it is a work in progress. I wish I had formed this habit years ago. I definitely value it more than all the old photo-albums that I would religiously update every six months. 

There are several reasons for this. Firstly, along with a process of selecting the really special images, I have taken a few moments to articulate why the image was special and what I remember about it. I have reflected on how it may have shaped who I am today.

Grateful for my story

I can also see the range of experiences that all go to create a sense of gratitude for the life I have led. This is not to sugar-coat or pretend there have not been difficulties and challenges along the way. It is up to us how we tell our own story and what we choose to focus on. In Part 2 of this blog, I share some of my grandfather’s story and how it captured the challenges that came his way and highlighted the values that he held dear and empowered him to surmount them. Knowing these challenges can give us, our children and their children a different perspective on events. I know with COVID-19, I was quick to prepare my own grown children with the perspective of “Well at least we are not being bombed”, which was the unfortunate reality for previous generations. The power of the written word is definitely felt when I create the pages of my family album. But to avoid this blog becoming too long, I elaborate on this element in part 2 of this blog.