Hello everyone, Have you ever found a diary, letter or journal written by an ancestor? Do you remember how excited you were to have that glimpse into great grandma's life and character? Or maybe you wish you could find something one of your ancestors wrote! I know I have felt that longing and excitement - excitement when I found 3 letters written by my great great grandfather to his mother in the 1840s. How often though do we genealogists stop and think about ourselves - and how excited a descendant would be 50 or 100 or 150 or more years from now - to find something that *we* wrote. It's important for us to write our own memoirs, to put our memories and stories down on paper for our descendants. I overcame my hesitation and my thinking that my memories would be boring and I began my Life Story last year. I started with my first memory and tried to keep my journal chronological. It was a matter of writing down my memories of each year of my life - or so I thought! That soon proved to be very difficult. I got confused - had I written about my mother falling on the ice her first time skating? Or my father dressing up as Santa then giving out the wrong presents? I simply could not recall what I had already written and what was a memory that had just surfaced. I decided to write by topic and that seemed to go much better! So 14 weeks ago I started a 52 week series called "Sharing Memories: A Genealogy Journey" at http://tiny.cc/mxw6z Each week (usually on Sundays) we have a topic to encourage us to write our stories. The stories can be private or they can be shared - either as a comment added to the blog or on your own blog or website. Topics we've written about so far include Memories of Grandmothers, Christmas Memories, Winter Meals, Birthday Parties, School Memories - First Day and Year of School. We've had some great feedback and contributions to this series and I wanted to be sure that more genealogists know about it! Every time I write something, another memory surfaces. Now there is even someone from my old hometown of Ajax who has joined us and her memories are helping me to recall more details. I didn't know her growing up as she was about 5 years older than me, but living in the same small town (yes it used to be very small - a village actually!) we experienced many of the same things. So, please drop by, read a few of the posts and contribute your own memories (again - you do not have to share them in public!) Get out a journal and start writing, your great great grandchild may thank you one day :-) Start at http://tiny.cc/mxw6z and go to the BOTTOM of the page as the posts are in order of most recent down to oldest. I hope you'll decide to join in. If you prefer, you can also join in on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=262536387326 It's a lot of fun and I find it really helps encourage us all to write when there are others joining in. Hope to see you there! Lorine -- Lorine McGinnis Schulze * Follow me on Twitter http://twitter.com/LorineMS * Olive Tree Genealogy http://olivetreegenealogy.com/ * Naturalization Records http://naturalizationrecords.com/ [email protected] or [email protected]