Carol's Corner

I sat at the table with my husband’s great aunt and listened to her tell stories for hours about past generations in England, those who came to settle on the prairies of Canada and the life they established in this new land. She looked at me and said, “Are you tired of hearing all these stories yet? It’s not even your family.”

My reply came quickly, “I love to hear all you have learned and the stories that bring these people to life. Besides, it is part of my children’s story.”

We also looked through many items this family had kept. I do not think they ever through much away. I held a waxy linen paper. Carefully unfolding the elaborately creased document, I discovered a will dated in the 1700’s. The intricate script, the wax seal and the details gave me a glimpse into life in England, centuries ago.
I read letters sent from one sister who remained in England to her sister living in Southern Saskatchewan. For
sixty years they corresponded to keep alive the family connection.

Letters from this family archive gave a glimpse into life on the Southern coast of England during WWI. Information in one letter talked about a German aeroplane and how the writer wondered if this machine would amount to anything in a war effort. Oh how things changed when I read another letter dated during WWII. This letter expressed the fear of blackouts and air raids, the rationing of food and the devastation years of war had already caused.

Reading from the history books never allows such personal glimpses of war, everyday life and reasons for immigration that family archives of letters, birth certificates, death notices or cards from various occasions. What a wealth of resources to share with family and those of us married into the family.

Not every family has such an archive of information. Sometimes the logistics of storing so much becomes too difficult. My oldest daughter enjoys this treasure trove of items from the past which means in this family there is at least one more generation willing to be the keeper of the items. We are facing the dilemma of how to make these many pieces available while not allowing the ravages of time to destroy them.

Do you have old letters, paperwork, statistical information to paint a picture of generations that have gone before and helped make our lives what they are today? How do you store the information.

Here is part of one letter dated in March 1915,

Dear Lulu,
I know that winter is still hanging on for you over there, but it is finally spring here in England. The flowers are beginning to bloom, my crocuses and daffodils are adding wonderful colour to the gardens – and we are seeing the sun again after months of rain, rain, rain. It’s good to have the rain stop for awhile.
Yet even though spring has come, life is STILL ALL WAR over here. We cannot escape the fact that we are at war. The reminders are everywhere. We still have 1400 soldiers billeted in our little town. It does make the town quite lively with their presence. The lads are working hard to get efficient in drilling, shooting, marching and trench digging. They have improved greatly since their training started.
After an outdoor church service in the park last Sunday we watched as the King’s Own Liverpool Rifles Regiment paraded around the area and then past THE GENERAL for an inspection of the troops. There was all the marching tunes played on the drums while they marched. It was really quite splendid. Then a few days later the Kent Mounted Rifles were through town on a recruiting march. The horses were so lovely – so fresh. The trained troops marching and riding through are quite a sight in their uniforms.

“We’re all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on.” Charles de Lint

We sat around visiting close family members after the death of my brother’s father-in-law, Jack. During this time of grieving, the family had the duty to sort through the belongings left behind. My niece and nephew eagerly told me about a find in their grandfather’s desk – a journal. Jack had always had a small notebook in the pocket of his shirt and would jot daily events, price of gas or food or some special event or appointment. There had been many notebooks throughout the years. Yet the family had been surprised at a larger notebook in his desk – a journal. No one, not even his wife, realized the time he had taken to record what he thought important enough to keep and be read by others. He had recorded some important facts and dates from his early years including his courtship and marriage to their grandmother. After a few pages of summary of his childhood, youth and marriage, the rest of the journal appeared to be a summary from all the small notebooks.

I loved to hear the excitement in the voices of my niece and nephew. They expressed what I had felt to be so important – we need to save family stories, facts and even bits of trivia to pass on when we are no longer here to tell the stories for ourselves. At the end of the conversation about Jack’s journal, my niece challenged me to write the stories from our side of their family so one day they could sit, read and reread the bits and pieces that were part of our life.

I have a box of old journals and day timers sitting at home. I wondered if the old calendars held any importance or if they should just be recycled. Now I knew. It was time to take the trivia, the events listed and use them as the starting point for a history of my own family – my husband and children, our adventures, our everyday activities or even my thoughts penned about various activities in our everyday lives. The future generations hopefully might be excited with these insights into life during different decades just like Jack’s family was about his.

Do you have a treasure trove of trivia recorded in appointment books, on calendars or in journals? I challenge you to consider using them as a basis to save family history and leave a legacy of memories.

In October 1902 Henry C. Quiring wrote in his journal, “Today I carried half my family to the grave.”

This simple, poignant statement leaves the reader with many unanswered questions. In a flood of curiosity, I long to know what happened? Why? How many is half his family? But it also causes me to wonder what happened next? How did he survive? Did he barely exist or eventually thrive again?

I had the privilege to grow up hearing more than this one heart wrenching statement. I know the prequel and the sequel to this journal entry for Henry C. Quiring is my great grandfather, whom I had the honour of knowing for the first twelve years of my life.

The family shared the story of the young couple, their almost two year old daughter and newborn baby who lived on their homestead in a sod house on the prairie. The happy occasion of the birth of this second child in August of 1902 soon turned to tragedy when mother and baby contracted tuberculosis and subsequently died in October, causing the penning of this one sentence to sum up a time of grief.

I heard about the tenacity, the faith and the community of believers that supported this young father and his child. I heard of Henry’s prayers for God to supply the right woman to be his new wife and mother for his daughter and how he waited patiently the entire winter, not only in the season of the year but of his life as well, for the answer.

Difficulty in life, tragedy and heartache were not uncommon to the pioneers. The story continues into the future. It includes a new pastor coming to lead the small church, bringing with him his wife and eleven children. Their homestead had a small wood framed house with hardly enough room for even a small family. The rocky hillsides made farming difficult. I heard about this wife and mother, who became Henry’s new mother-in-law.

Each day Henry’s new mother-in-law spent some quiet time. Her eleven children knew that mom was not to be disturbed as she knelt by a huge limestone rock buried into the ground in front of their tiny home. She shed so many tears during her daily alone time with God that her children dubbed it the Crying Stone. She never shared the reasons for the tears with anyone. The burdens she cried about remained a secret between her and her God.

As an adult I looked around that steep, rocky hillside surrounding the old homestead. I tried to imagine the land with no roads, no modern transportation or communication and guessed what may have crossed her mind. Maybe she shed tears of loneliness as she missed family left behind in the old country. Some tears may have been shed as she wondered this ground could provide for their needs. She may have been burdened with concerns for her neighbours and fellow church goers or her own children. Likely the tears represented a combination of all these concerns. Yet she remained strong in her faith, teaching her children that hardships could be lived through and overcome. They in turn taught their children, who passed it on to my generation. These family stories of survival in the midst of tough times are part of the fabric of my family and therefore help to make me who I am today.

We may not have had to write a journal entry like Henry did in 1902, but each of us, through all the generations have experienced tough times, tragedy and heartache. These hardships can destroy us or help us grow stronger. My faith, passed on from generations before me and now made my own, will help carry me through the storms in my life. The stories of long ago inspire me and challenge me to journal my responses to various life events as well as encourage me to seek my place of quiet refuge during each busy, activity filled day.

What family story inspires and challenges you?

“Preserve your memories, keep them well, what you forget you can never retell.” Louisa May Alcott

Always curious, I eagerly opened a plain round tin my mother handed me when I was eight years old. I pried open the tight fitting lid, undid the tissue paper, yellowed with age, and found a child’s china tea set. None of the pieces had chips, cracks or blemishes in the blue trimmed, sand coloured set.

“My sister Luella and I got this as our Christmas present when I was almost four. We had to share. Now I decided to give it to you.” my mom said. I thanked her and then begged for more of the story surrounding this tea set. She rarely shared more than a few details of life from her growing up years and this time was not different.

I continued to want more stories and details of my mother’s life as a child and young woman. From the snippets of information, I knew that many of the events held a lot of pain like the death of her sister Luella just before my mom turned ten. Several months before mom’s eleventh birthday, life became even harder. Her mother, my grandmother, suffered a massive stroke four days before the birth of her youngest child. But my quiet, soft spoken, hard working mother never gave more than a glimpse into what life must have been like, at least not until her heart began to fail.

One day my mom decided the time had come to preserve her story and family events. She talked and I recorded her stories. Probing questions from me pulled more details from her memory. We browsed through old photo albums. I made sure that each picture had the appropriate caption and the faces would not remain nameless once mom was gone.

For eight months, mom reminisced and I wrote. We dug out some written family history and old photos. Then we matched them up with mom’s memories. Yet too soon the time came to say good bye to mom. I still have questions I wish I had been able to ask, yet I am grateful for the memories I recorded. I typed the tales, wrote an epilogue of the experience and her funeral and made copies of the memoir for her sisters, her grown up grandchildren and a few cousins. Mom’s memoir gives me the opportunity to review the stories of the past, see how they helped shape the person I am today and cherish the memory of time with my mother during the last eight months of her life.

Why did mom resist, for so many years, sharing the lessons and stories of the past? I do not know but I am glad I had the opportunity to record them once she offered to share. I began to understand how these many events helped shape my mother into the person I knew. I can not rewind history and preserve the stories my grandparents told me, I can simply write the ones I remember. However I can learn from the past and share my life lessons and stories with my children and grandchildren.

How are you working on preserving your family stories?

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Those words had echoed in my mind and heart for many years, from toddler aged grandchildren climbing on my knee with their favourite story book in hand until my now teenage grandchildren flopped on the living room floor begging for stories.

“What story do you want to hear” I asked

Occasionally they had a specific one they wanted to hear but often they responded with, “It doesn’t matter. Just tell us stories.”

Rosemary Alva said, “We don’t own our family history. We simply preserve it for the next generation.”

Storytelling with my children and grandchildren is one opportunity to preserve the family history and pass it on to the next generations without waiting for someone’s funeral when we typically begin to reminisce about their life, our family and what they meant to us. When we wait for special occasions, often sad ones, we miss the opportunity to fill in the blanks, to add to what we remember or refresh our memory of a long ago story or event in our family.

Over the last couple Christmas seasons, my teenage grandchildren in Ontario wanted to have grandma and grandpa tell how we met. They laughed at some of the parts but begged for details before turning to their parents to have them share their own love story. Of course they thought it might be a great idea to let grandma and grandpa fill in our thoughts on the dating, engagement and marriage of their parents. What did they learn that night? Maybe something sparked an idea for future dates they might have or finding the mate God intends for each of them. If nothing else it shared some memories, adding details to help the next generation know the beginnings of their family from before their own memories began.

Another evening at our daughter’s, who lives a few minutes from us, we listened to the struggle one of our granddaughters had with her English assignment. She decided grandpa needed to tell some adventure stories from when we lived in an isolated community in Northern Saskatchewan. She hoped this might give her an idea for the assignment to write an adventure story. After an entertaining evening of story telling, the granddaughter wrote her story based on one of her grandfather’s tales.The teachers comments, “You have a great imagination.” reminded me that truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.

We all have stories based on every experience in our lives. These tales may include love and romance, adventure and unique encounters or just what life used to be like in comparison with today. No matter the subject matter there are lessons to be learned, memories to be shared and family history to be passed on to the next generations.

How do you share your memories and family history?

My calendar felt overfull. This clip art shows how I felt. I had Toastmasters ( an international educational organization where people can learn, grown and practice communication skills) including multiple meetings during the week, mentoring, leadership and special events. I had penciled in a few workshops to teach on communication skills, speaking engagements, everyday items that needed attending to and wondered how to fit in some writing. I looked at each role I had as separate entities. I was a wife, mother, grandmother. I was a Toastmaster, speaker, teacher for workshops and sometimes had time to add writing to the mix. My head whirled with ideas that never seemed to go beyond the idea stage. How did all these pieces fit together?

My husband said, “Quit looking at the pieces but look at the whole. You are a storyteller! You tell stories to your family. You tell stories at your workshops and other speaking engagements and you tell stories at Toastmasters, whether as a speech or in leadership. Writing is simply one more way to tell those stories. See they all fit – you are a storyteller – one thing not many.”

I pondered his words and realized the truth in it. Telling stories helped me learn and disseminate information to others in various venues. Storytelling energized me, encouraged me and excited me. It also allowed others to feel comfortable to share their stories and I could learn from them.

Therese Fowler’s quote, “The history of storytelling isn’t one of simply entertaining the masses but of also advising, instructing, challenging the status quo.” ties in with my husband’s words beautifully. The heading of storytelling incorporated all the facets of what I did from mentoring to teaching, from speaking to telling stories to my grandchildren and even to the written words I used to preserve the stories for others.

Now I am brave enough to say, “I am a storyteller.”

How does storytelling fit into your life?

Welcome to 31 days of blog posts on Storytelling, one of my favourite things to do. I hope you enjoy this glimpse into my love of stories in many forms.

Vera Nazarian said, “The world is shaped by two things – stories told and the memories they leave behind.”

I remember sitting by my mom or grandfather, curled close under their arms, as they read me stories. I recall the many visits to my paternal grandmother’s home and listening to stories, sometimes told for my ears alone but often gleaned from while sitting quietly overhearing the adult conversation and storytelling swirling around me. The memory of story is imprinted deep into my mind and on my heart.

My first teacher, with her head of white hair, reminded me of a grandmother but the most special thing I remember about her is how she taught me to read. This opened up an entire new world of imaginative places to visit and multitude of interesting facts to learn. Chores often got put on hold while I finished the next chapter or two of whatever book I currently held. Lights out stretched as long as I dared to reach a fitting place to stop in the journey of the book’s hero or heroine. I often cheated the rules by reading with a flashlight under the covers or by the street light outside my window. Reading allowed more stories to entice me, thrill me, educate me or simply entertain me from a young age until now.

Today I continue enjoying family stories. I wish I had the foresight to record my grandparents’ stories and wonder how many tales are lost for this very reason. I am trying to spend more time recording the stories I hear and have lived for future generations. But beyond the recounting of personal tales of adventure, everyday life, triumph and tragedy, I realize the importance of story and storytelling in presentations, workshops and relating to other people.

In this October blog series on Storytelling I plan to look at types of stories, tips for storytelling and the power of a story to reach into people’s hearts, tug at their emotions and help them remember the key point you want to make as a presenter. I invite you to join me on this journey into the land of storytelling – a journey never far away from where you are and the memories you hold dear.

My web page, Carol’s Corner has been up and running for a few years, but this blog is a new endeavor for me. I enjoy the opportunity to connect with others in real life and through the on line community. My blog will be a place to share things that resonate with me and come from the heart.

Helen Keller said, “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched, they must be felt with the heart.” There are the beautiful things I think of such as the hug from family or friends, especially in a time of crisis. I am filled with wonder by the trust of a child, able to fall asleep in your arms and know they are safe. But there are also the times of deep grief which touch our hearts in a way that no words can express. When we least expect it, something will shed a ray of light and hope. What touches you deeply? What comes from a deep place inside that our senses do not begin to describe how we feel?

May your day be filled with beauty deep within your heart and may it colour your world with love and hope.