I would listen to these stories with interest but I never thought to record these stories or even to note down who these people were and how they were related to me.
Unrecorded, these stories only existed as unwritten memories. Gradually they began to be lost.
As years went by, the number of surviving members of the older generations declined and these important memories were extinguished.
In time, when I already had my own family, I started to think more about these stories. They represented the experiences and family history that had led my family to where they were and to the point at which my sister and I were introduced into the world. Subsequently our own children were born.
This was part of our heritage and part of the key to who we are.
It was later still when I discover that my first cousin had created a family tree covering the reasonably close family on my fathers side that I began to feel a desire to build our family tree.
I realised that my first task should be to do something similar for my mothers family.
My work began with a conversation with my mother. She had very few surviving relatives and by this time there was nobody else left alive in England. She had come over from Vienna in the late 1930's with her mother and father and was only able to provide some of her early recollections that related to her family. She was only 7 when she left Vienna and she could not remember the full names and relationships for many of the family that had been around when she left.
She had a hand written tree that she had been given many years ago. It had been done by a cousin from memory without research and mostly only showed first names.There was a mark against each person who had passed away before the end of WWII. Some had died earlier but most died had because of it and mainly in the camps.
More than ever, I now felt a need to add more detail and build on this family tree.
No comments:
Post a Comment