Today, people are so disconnected that they feel they are blades of grass, but when they know who their grandparents and great-grandparents were, they become trees, they have roots, they can no longer be mowed down.
Maya Angelou, poet, actress, author, director; on Oprah show, January 2003
I find this quote resonates with me. I never knew my grandfathers. They both died before I was born. All I have are some grainy old photographs and snippets of information. One grandfather was a Winnipeg, Manitoba fireman. He died at the age of thirty-two from the flu pandemic that swept the world after The First World War. My other grandfather died in 1939 after eventually succumbing to lung damage, the result of a poison gas attack on a WWI battlefield.
If the technology we possess today had existed back then, how wonderful it would be to put on a DVD and hear and see my grandfathers talking about their lives. I urge everyone to capture their family stories before they’re lost forever.
Photo by nugunslinger
I never knew my grandfathers or grandmothers.
All died before I was born in 1935, except for my maternal grandmother who died when I was two years old. My mother would bundle me in the rear shelf of her car (under the rear windshield) and drive 30 miles to the country farmhouse where her mother was an invalid. Of course I remember only a few of the stories my mother told me. How I wish I had tape recordings of those stories she told me when I was in my teens. (Of course tape recorders were the size of a suitcase and tape was two inches wide.) I’m thankful for todays technologies!
cheers, ches
@Ches Applewhite. Thanks for your story, Ches. It speaks to our need to record and preserve our family stories.