Life Lessons

Passing On Your Family History to Your Grandkids

/ Dave Price / 1 Comment

Of all the gifts that grandparents can give their grandchildren, few are grander than a sense of where they fit in to the history of their family.

Why do I say that? Well, who is better positioned than grandparents to be the family griots, a term for those great African storytellers, whose job it is to be a repository of tribal history, traditions, and culture and pass them on to future generations?

But this family storytelling idea is more than just a wonderful bonding custom; it has a proven basis in scientific fact.

Researchers at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia have found that children who know a lot about their families have higher self-esteem than those who only know a little. In addition, those children aware of family history are more likely to feel in control of their own lives.

Passing on Your Family History Personally

Now, while my wife and I both knew the importance of family history when we got married 43 years ago, we were really just too busy getting through the day to come up with an organized plan to pass that information on to our only son or his cousins.

But, of course, by the time our first grandchild arrived 8 years ago, we were in a much different situation.

Not surprisingly, Judy, being an artist and manager of an art gallery, chose a visual approach to letting our granddaughter, and then our grandson, be introduced to their personal past.

She framed dozens and dozens of pictures of relatives and family events and then created a portrait gallery on the long stairwell wall leading to our 3rd floor. When our grandchildren visited, she would carry them one at a time up the stairs, pausing to point out who some of these people were, what they did, and then answering any questions from Audrey and Owen.

As a writer and a teacher, I chose a different, more sedentary method. When our son was old enough to understand the alphabet, I would write letters on his back when I put him to bed after story time.

He would have to guess the letters. Later, I broadened that idea to have him try to tactilely feel out simple words I would write.

With my grandchildren, I expanded that technique to use the back-written words to introduce a family background story that I would then tell them, often tailoring that tale to something they had asked about or encountered during the day.

Of course, these are just 2 ideas. There are almost as many ways to tell family stories to grandkids as there are grandparents to tell them. Here are some other suggestions:

Visual Ways of Family Storytelling

  • Make a family photo album and share it with your grandkids.
  • If you are technologically savvy, create a family history picture compendium online. Perhaps you can even get some computer tips from your grandchildren for this one. Nothing says younger ones can’t teach older ones.
  • Fill in a family calendar with important dates for your family and discuss it periodically (weekly, monthly, seasonally, etc.)
  • If your grandchildren are like ours, they love memory matching card games. Create a set of matching cards using pictures of family members and/or events and play it with your grandchildren. You can assign bonus points if they recount facts about the pictures on the cards.
  • If you have easy access to a number of family burial sites, make tombstone rubbings and use them to prompt directed family discussions. This is a good way to introduce the ideas of death and dying when your grandchildren are ready for such a talk.

Written Ways of Sharing Family History

  • Make a Me – My Parents – My Grandparents Chart. If you’re not familiar with this fun learning exercise, here is an example of how it works. Create a 4-column chart. At the horizontal top of columns 2, 3, and 4 places the designations Me, Parents, Grandparents. Working vertically down, assign subjects for column 1 such as – at age 6 my favorite food, TV program, book, activity, sport, etc. The possibilities are endless. Use the answers to discuss personal history and cultural changes.
  • If you have access to old handwritten letters or diaries, transcribe some of the entries and read them with your grandchildren. This may get them interested in writing their own letters, diaries, or journals.
  • Compose a short Focused Memoir Chapter. Pick one event from your life and write it up as if it was going to be part of your overall autobiography or memoir and share it. You can write about something as routine as spending a spring day in the park or as historic as watching the first man walk on the moon.
  • Create an abbreviated written version of your Family’s Food Heritage. Seek out favorite recipes from family members and write them down. Add a short bio piece with each recipe. If you want a more hands on approach, make some of the simple recipes with your grandchildren.
  • Find online newspaper clips of historic events in your lifetime. Write down your feelings and reactions to those events. Create a scrapbook or online blog to share all of this with your grandkids.

Extending Learning About Your Family History

If your grandchildren express a real interest in family history, here are 2 involved collaborative projects you can enjoy together:

  • Plan and undertake a Family History Field Trip. For example, if Judy and I were to take such a trip with our grandchildren, we would go back to the small New Jersey community of Bridgeton, where we were born and lived for 59 years. You could even record the entire adventure with a video camera or your cell phone and then have your own family documentary episode.
  • Create a Family Museum Exhibit of Important Ancestral Artifacts. For example, if we were going to create The Price Family Ancestral Museum, we would need artifacts from my career as a writer and an educator; Judy’s art years, my Dad’s military, dry cleaning plant operator, and professional gambling years; my Mom’s 50 years as a school teacher; Judy’s Dad’s career in glass manufacturing; and her Mom’s years as a homemaker and retail sales clerk.

History, whether it is that of a small farm family or a massive nation state, is really the personal stories of how people faced the challenges and changes in a specific period of time

Speaking of the challenges of our time, Dr. Linda Fried, dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University in New York City says: “The elderly are the only increasing natural resource in the world”.

So hey there, fellow resources, I think a great way to begin offering our advantages to the world around us is to share what we know about our own family and times with our grandchildren.

I hope you agree.

I also hope to meet you somewhere out there on our intersecting family history trails. We have so much to offer, not only to our own families, but to each other.

You’re Never Too Old to Protest, But Sometimes You Discover the Street Isn’t the Best Place for You to Do That

/ Dave Price / Leave a comment
Photo by Bruce Guthrie

I began my political activism – or, translating that into the parlance of today became woke – in 1968 in my then-conservative hometown of Bridgeton in rural southern New Jersey. One year later, I not only continued that local activism, but expanded my protesting to include the Villanova University campus where I was enrolled as a college student and, periodically through the year and the early years of the decade to follow, at various sites in Washington, DC.

The act of protesting itself and contact with my fellow protesters, most of whom were then older, taught me much about life. For example, it was in the nation’s capital where I was first tear gassed. And where I was first maced. I was spit on and pushed by counter protesters and chased by law enforcement many times. As an activist, I was arrested, harassed, and detained on occasion. I had a policeman in full riot gear place the barrel of a shotgun against the side of my neck and scream “I told you. Shut the fuck up”. I took his advice in the short term and shut up. But after being released from jail the next morning, I resumed my protesting.

From 1974 to 2011, I continued protesting injustice, but almost all of it was done in a much different way — first as a newspaper reporter and then as an educator in poverty-plagued urban school systems. When my wife and I retired, we moved to Crystal City, Virginia, which is only 3 Metro stops from Washington, DC, meaning I could again protest, rally, and march in the nation’s capital. I worked with and aided Occupy Washington. I marched for gay rights, same sex marriage, Black Lives Matter, women’s rights, and science and the environment and I marched against corporate greed, the blood-drenched NRA, and the senseless slaughter of our students in their schools. On 2 occasions, I actually had a chance to speak directly to Donald Trump outside the White House with Kremlin Annex, a group who held nightly rallies opposing the current temporary resident living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Of course, Trump probably didn’t hear me because he was inspecting his White House bunker, watching Fox Fake News with the sound turned up, or tweeting in bed with a cheeseburger on his lap.

Today, another massive rally was scheduled for Washington, DC for many of the causes I believe in, but for the first time since we have been in the DC area, I was not participating.

There were several reasons for my decision. And in the spirit of all those radicals from the 20s and 30s who were kind enough to share their wisdom and experience with me, I would like to offer the same to the young protesters of today, who someday will find themselves old.

If I had to describe myself politically now, I would say I am an uber-liberal, a former radical now tempered by reality and age. I still realize that America faces serious threats to its survival, many of them like racism, class, and income equality carried over from our ’60s days of rage. We also now have the specter of worldwide climate change and global warming which portend the end of life as we know it. And, as the proverbial cherry on the top of this melting poisonous spoiled-ice-cream-mountain-mess of destruction, we also have a coronavirus pandemic which has already taken more than 100,000 American lives and is still with us.

All these deadly threats are compounded by the fact that we are being led (or not being led depending on your personal view) by Donald J. Trump, already identified by historians as the worst of the 45 American presidents.

The realist in me has prioritized that the one thing I can most readily change to help the future is to keep Donald Trump from achieving a second term as president. That is the main reason I chose not to take to the DC streets today. In order to continue working against Trump from now until Election Day and then casting my vote for the person I believe has the best chance of defeating him, I must be alive. As a person in the prime age for COVID0-19, I don’t think the best place for me right now is surrounded by thousands of people, making social distancing impossible.

In addition, neither protesting or the activist skills I now possess are the same as when I first began my activism in the ’60s. While huge protests still prove a point, with the 24-hour news cycle, cable TV, and ubiquitous social media, all protests, not just those in Washington, DC, now find their way onto personal screens everywhere, making the days of huge solidifying marches not as necessary to show the volume of support. In addition, as a writer who uses social media, I have more opportunity there not only to have my face seen and my body counted, but my words can reach far more people than ever before. I also appear on live shows dealing with politics and was scheduled to be on one shared on YouTube, Facebook, and Periscope at the same time I would have been at the DC rally.

But that does not mean I was comfortable staying home, no mater how much work for the cause I felt I was doing.

In a way, I guess it’s analogous to the professional athlete who has reached the end of his on-field playing career and now realizes he can best help his team by managing or coaching from the sidelines. Of course, you miss the thrill that only happens on the field, but you come to understand you can still be a crucial component of any team victory.

So for all the young protesters out there today in DC or anywhere else where I can’t be in upcoming days, here’s some advice:

  • If you are protesting for any cause that Donald Trump is opposing, don’t have second thoughts about if you are right. One of the few constants in life is that Trump is always on the wrong side of what is good.
  • Do not be discouraged for long (although there will be many times when you want to abandon the cause). Major lasting change does not happen overnight. It might not even happen in your lifetime. But if you truly believe in something, fighting for it gives your own life meaning and the fight itself should be viewed as its own reward.
  • Out in the streets today, keep in mind that you should keep using safety recommendations to avoid contacting the virus — wear a mask, try to keep a physical distance of 6 feet from any sustained personal contact, keep hydrated, etc., — and if you feel any signs of illness, immediately remove yourself from the protest and seek immediate medical attention.
  • Be sure to be vigilant and survive all encounters with law enforcement. The cause does not need more martyrs. Tragically, we have too many of them. The passion and commitment you demonstrate by participating in the street is powerful and worthy of great praise, but we need your vote in November to defeat Trump. Then we can move to the next steps to resolve the myriad of problems Trump’s abysmal four-year presidency has only exacerbated.
  • Keep in mind that any sustained action calling for systemic change requires both protesters of the school of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (peaceful, nonviolent) and those who would have followed Malcolm X (by any means necessary). There is place for everyone in a revolution.
  • Do not expect any immediate results from your protesting. Right now, we are simply calling attention to problems in such a way that they become impossible for others to ignore. If you are committed for the long haul, there will be much more to do for you and all those standing (or sitting, or kneeling, or lying on the ground) next to you now.
  • Finally, it is hard for so many of us to breathe right now. For some groups, it has been hard for their members to breathe for centuries. But just because something has been, does not mean it must always be. Change can happen. But it takes a whole lot of dedication, work, resilience, and most all of hope. Please, whatever else you do, do not give up hope. For hope, coupled with action, is always the strongest activist weapon of all.