Procrastinate? Moi?

Once again I procrastinate. I must say though I have not felt guilty at all. I only have so much time in a day. Things have been very very busy. I am still on the Genealogy project and really have not explored any of my other projects. It is just so addicting. I find name after name and date after date. Eventually I will be able to put it all together. I have spoken with my grandmother and I am going to go back to do the same again. I am also going to interview other members of the family. I am hoping that any bits of information will help in someway.

I am starting from the top and working my way down. You may think it is silly to interview different people within the same family. My grandmother should be enough, any information I got from anyone else, would be the same as my grandmothers since my grandmother would have told them the stories. I am quickly learning though, that different stories are told to different people, depending on the situation and the individual. I think I do it myself with my own children. We are not all together as a family all the time and sometimes a situation comes up, or one of the kids make a face, or does something to remind me of my childhood, and it provokes a story. I may have opportunity to repeat it to another one of the kids or I may not. Even if I did tell the same story to each child individually or apart, they may each interpret it in their own way and with their own meaning. I may vary my story forgetting bits or remembering bits on different occasions. This is the nature of story telling. So in light of that fact, I think the more people I speak to, the more bits and leads I will have to follow and that increases my chances of tracing things as far back as I can go.

I have been doing a lot of recording also, either vocal recordings or written recordings. I  feel a great urge to make records of our lives for our great grandchildren someday. Not every little detail, but I hope there is never anyone so embarrassed by me that they try to cover up who I am. If I do my future family the honor of being presentable as a grandmother and great grandmother then I wish to leave an easy to follow trail to all the answers of the questions I found I have about my great grandparents. Although our generations are so close together that it would probably be my great great great granddaughters time before I am forgotten (I hope).

I have no grand ideas about embellishing, elaborating or excluding details about my life. Or the lives of anyone before me. I hope that one day, of my own experience and standing, I will be interesting enough and possibly have recorded enough of my own personality, character and experience that a future generation will find me a worthwhile pastime to read about on a rainy afternoon. Or maybe even find a commonality in character, flaw or habit. I find it a comfort that I like Tunnocks tea cakes, cabbage, tea, and a whole list of other things, be it food, habits, ideas or style, that may be linked in anyway to my past. Even if those likes and habits were formed out of suggestion, due to ideas of what life may have been like, and what long dead relatives may have been like, as opposed to actual living relatives passing them on.

There are some traits that go deeper than eye color that are passed on though. This is what makes me want to find out more about my ancestry. My oldest daughters signature and that of my great grandfather, are almost identical aside from being different first names. How does this happen? My daughter had never met or viewed any of my great grandfathers writing. Where does the strength that the women in this family come from? Why do the women in this family keep making decisions, that end up causing us to need such superhuman emotional strength? These are the answers I am looking for. Our family is not perfect, has not always done well, has not always come out of whatever troubles we have gotten into, but I want to identify myself and connect to this family that is mine.

Thats it for tonight, my thoughts are yours to read.
Goodnight