Preserving Family Memories through a Legacy Book
Tim Harden has always had a passing interest in genealogy, but his desire to search the past for the answers his family was missing came to a head during a casual conversation with his aging mother in 2015.
“My 93-year-old mother told me she didn't know her grandparents on either side of the family,” Harden said. “And she was 93!”
After recovering from his surprise about her lack of family knowledge, Harden made a plan. From that moment on, it was a race against time to reveal her ancestors and the details of their lives while his mother could still savor the stories. However, Harden knew he needed professional help to pull it off. He had poked around enough in online collections to realize that the sheer number of records, certificates, articles, and photos that are accessible in digital form could be overwhelming.
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“Every time I sat down…about a half-hour in, I wanted to throw the computer through the wall, because it was so frustrating just to get information in, and then it was even more frustrating to try to get information out [to the point] that you could say, ‘Yeah, that makes sense, and that links to something that's true,’" Harden said.
That’s when he called AncestryProGenealogists®. Because his mother’s family immigrated to America from Italy, Harden’s case was assigned to George Ott, a research manager whose team specializes in Italian research, among other areas. They revealed 300 years of his mother’s family history in just three months.
“The team did a phenomenal job of uncovering her ancestry back to the 1700s on both sides,” Harden said. “This was August when she told me that, and by November, we were able to hand a family tree to her of her ancestry on both sides of the family.”
Harden’s mother was delighted, but he realized as she held the family tree in her hands that the information was still only words and dates on a page. He wanted to bring it to life, so he asked AncestryProGenealogists® Storytelling Team to take it from there. Starting with the earliest known ancestors, they used the information the research team had found to write and design a chronological family story, describing the joys and tragedies of the lives of his immigrant ancestors. The team wove in historical events to provide context about what those ancestors’ daily lives were like, and highlighted the family’s own precious photos and mementos along the way. The story was collected in a hardbound book that became a priceless gift for Harden’s mother’s last birthday on Earth.
“So she had it for [her last] six months, and she read it every single day,” Harden said. “So, incredible joy that she got that . My sisters–same thing, you know? And my cousins, same thing. It just filled in a lot of the blanks…there were a lot of family mysteries that were unraveled and truth laid out as we went through this process.”
Although his father died in 2005, Harden also wanted to uncover the details about his paternal ancestors. Research on that side of the family has been even more fruitful, and Harden has another legacy book underway to share with his siblings and paternal family members. His father’s ancestors include some of the first settlers in Virginia and Maryland, who fought in the American Revolution and later braved the Oregon Trail to become some of the initial settlers in the ranchlands of northern California. Throughout their lives, they also faced trying times. Obstacles that could have paralyzed his father’s progress became his impetus to find a path to success. Harden’s father left a legacy behind in his four loving and successful children, and his teaching and coaching contributions to California Polytechnic University are innumerable. To capture the man he was, Harden asked his AncestryProGenealogists® book author to interview him and his sisters , and the personal memories and tributes they shared became highlights of the book’s text.
Seeing the power of family story in this way, Harden decided to honor his wife’s family by capturing their memories in their own voices, too. More comfortable in the genealogy realm, they had already developed a massive family tree. The missing piece was the rich oral history that animated that legacy and filled in the gaps of their lives and personalities. The final products, after four interviews with his in-laws and their siblings, were audio files of the interviews and two softcover booklets containing the full transcript of their responses and some treasured family photos . The family presented 119 copies of these bound transcripts to their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren this past Christmas.
Harden was again able to see that capturing the curiosity of the younger generation depended on bringing the family tree alive through story. His own adult children were only mildly interested in the family tree on a page, but their interest spiked when they saw the book.
“When the story came to life, that's when they got really interested,” Harden said. “They shared it with some of their kids, but they're still young. But they now have something to point to, which is really cool. If I just had put the family tree together, it would have been great, but it would not have been special. By putting the story together of the family tree, it became special. And that difference is worth the dollars that you pay to make it special.”
Harden says he has no regrets about spending the time and money to create legacy books and oral histories for his family, except that he did not start sooner so he could share it with his father before he died. But he now tells anyone who will listen about the lasting impact this journey has had on his family.
“There's an old saying that if you have really good service, you'll tell 10 people, and if you have really bad service, you'll tell 100 people,” Harden said. “The old adage was just the reverse for me. I told 100 people about how this came about and why it came about. And it connects with just about everyone I talked to who had similar experiences, or my being able to tell them my journey got them started to do their own histories.”
The book on Harden’s paternal ancestors will be published in the summer of 2018.