Weekly Question #4 — Family History Across Generations

Question: How interested are your children and grandchildren in the history of your family? No doubt they’ve heard from you stories about the family’s past—but since they live in a different country and a different society, how engaging and understandable to them is everything that happened to the characters in your stories?

Let’s start with the general and move to the particular. This is a fairly typical pattern that repeats from generation to generation: when people are young, they couldn’t care less about family history—and then, alas, by the time they’re interested, there’s no one left to ask. It felt important to me to break that chain of forgetting.

Right now, my grandchildren aren’t really into it. Just as I, at their age, had no interest in family stories. Even my daughter—very much an adult now—isn’t quite ready for them either. But I hope that when the grandchildren, or their mother, reach the “right” age, this book will come in handy. And if not for them—then for the great-grandchildren.