When It’s all too late

This week we attended the funeral of my husband’s Aunt Enid. I had only had the opportunity to meet her twice, once at a family birthday party and again at our wedding. Actually, let me rephrase that, I didn’t make the effort to get to spend any more time with her.

Isn’t it always the way that you only really find out about someone at their funeral! I discovered that as a young adult she was a professional dancer at the City Varieties, having spent my childhood taking dance classes, and on one occasion danced in a show at the same theatre it would have been lovely to hear about her experiences.

Genealogists often know more about their ancestors than their living family

I read a post in a user group on Facebook recently, I can’t remember who by, stating that they knew so much more about their ancestors than they do about their living relatives. Paradoxically as genealogists or family historians we are gathering all this information to pass down to future generations, yet we and our peers will also be ancestors to someone at some point.

A lot of advice given to new genealogists talks about starting with what you know and interviewing older relatives about their ancestors and the memories they have of previous generations. I think, however, maybe the best place to start is maybe with who is around you now, find out about them before it is too late.

Useful Information to Find out about your family members

Here are some questions you may want to ask:

• What is your earliest memory?
• Where did you grow up?
• Where did you go to school?
• How did you celebrate childhood birthdays?
• Tell me about a memorable holiday?
• What was your first job?
• Do you have any hobbies?
• What is your greatest achievement?
• Who has been your greatest inspiration?
• What does it feel like to be you?

Never leave things too late look after all the branches of your tree

Interestingly my diagnosis of Fibromyalgia may be influencing the direction of my blog and will no doubt have an impact upon much of my future life however if I was to answer my own questionnaire it would only be touched upon in the last answer.

So what have I learnt from my experiences this week? Never leave things too late, I will be taking action and interviewing my relatives as soon as I can arrange it. Remember that the person you see in front of you is only an image of a snapshot in time, they have lived a life and have abundant stories to tell.