Foreword

My great-grandmother researched her husband's family history and compiled it all into an informative, yet personable, collection of family stories. These were typewritten by her and distributed to her children and grandchildren. My mom now has a few of these binders, some remaining in pristine condition as they went largely untouched and unappreciated. Finishing this project just years before her death in 1976, she would never see this work published beyond the few copies she made herself.

The first 57 pages of her 290-page collection deals with the distant and not-so-distant history of my  family, from the Dutchman who got his head blown off by a canon, to the English cousins whose correspondence ends shortly after the start of WWII: an eerie cliffhanger never resolved.

The children to whom my great-grandmother wrote these stories are now themselves almost gone: my grandmother and her brother, leaving her sister and another brother left. In the foreword to Part II of our history, she addresses each of her children--specifically, to her son who succumbed to Parkinson's disease five years ago.

In this letter, she speaks about memory; of the people who are already gone, and chillingly, she says, "Who will even be living a few years from now who will remember us or them?"

I'm converting stories, written by a woman who died before I was even an idea, into a technology she never lived to see; through her stories, I've developed the closest connection to extended family I've ever known. I've found myself starting to add comments into the word document. When she described her favourite picture of her husband, I asked her if that picture still exists. The "talk to the author" direction, of my high school history class' document analyses, is becoming a very literal practice.

I've decided to start this blog as a place to record and develop my reactions to these stories. Her vignettes are primary documents of historical events never available in high school textbooks. The reprinted letters from English cousins who decry Hitler, and refuse to seek refuge from the threat of war, give me incredible insight into the collective personality that is my family: "I am not going to run away from The Fuerer -- we haven’t the slightest intention of being beaten by any Nazis."