What information should someone collect now about their living relatives? One of the neat things that is going on right now is that so many people are involved in scrapbooking. The things you collect about...
The things you collect about your living relatives is much the same as what you collect for your dead ones. Names, information on birth, marriage, children and death. However, we all should keep in mind the privacy issue with living people and not share or post information on living people. Neither is it the job of family historians to make public any family skeletons that might be hiding in the closet unless the people involved are long dead.
The most important thing to collect from our living relatives is family stories. Preserving family stories is one of the fun things that family historians do. Many people collect family recipes or compile information on family traditions.
One of the neat things that is going on right now is that so many people are involved in scrapbooking. Scrapbooking is very much a preservation of the current family. Some scrapbooking companies have put out albums specifically for grandparents. They are made for a grandparent to fill out information and pass it down to their children or grandchildren and they are really, really nice. That is getting a lot of people more interested in collecting information and trying to find out information.
Probably the best thing that anyone can do today is to jot down things that have happened to you, jot down your memories. You don't have to write a book, you don't have to keep a journal or a diary, just jot down things that are important to you, your memories. For example, one of my favorite memories of one of my sons is when he was two he crawled in the cabinet and filled the sugar bowl with pepper, I can still see him setting there laughing and sneezing at the same time. Another memory of mine is the day that one of my sons walked in and said, "Mama, where are my jeans?" and when I told him they were in the washer he started crying, "You've killed my worms." (He had a pocket full of worms). These are the types of things that you need to write down, things you may not remember later. These are the memories to leave for your children. I know that most family historians or genealogists would give anything for a diary of our ancestors because that tells us how that person truly lived day to day, makes them real. Do your descendents a favor and leave your memories.
Take your pictures, go through them, write down on the back who these people are, where this picture was made and any little note you can think of (acid free gel pen or #2 soft lead pencil please so it doesn't bleed through). There are thousands of old pictures out there and we don't know who they are because the people who knew are now dead.
If you do nothing else, do these two things: jot down memories as you think about them and go through your pictures, label every single one of them. Don't put them back in those nasty photo albums that have the sticky back because that will ruin your pictures.
Do your pictures, make the notes. Leave something for your children and your grandchildren and great grandchildren.
