Once Upon a Time



“It pains me at times, when I think about the wonderful family stories we are losing everyday as our older generation passes away.  For hundreds, even thousand of years, families had a connection with their past in the oral traditions passed down from generation to generation.  They told stories as they worked together, or hunted together, or as they sat around the campfire or the fireplace.  In some small way, I had that as a child, too, when I attended the extended family gatherings we had for holidays.  After a satisfying meal round my grandmother’s large dinner table, my grandparents and parents and aunts and uncles told stories and laughed until tears flowed.
            “We don’t do that anymore.  The distances are too great; our lives are too busy, too complicated.  So the older folk keep hundreds of stories inside, stories about what people were like, people we will never know; what the times were like of days we have never seen; what the stories were, the stories that their older fold told them.  Now our elders keep their stories and carry them to the grave or lose them in the mists of a clouded memory.  How sad!.”
---Jeanne Nelson

Source:
Nelson, Jeanne.  “Every Reason in the World…”, rootsweb.com, Family Newsletter News, published online 4 February 2000, http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~bruce/FamNewsNews.htm.

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