Counting Our Blessings

Counting our blessings can help us realize we’re not alone when we’re researching and writing our family’s stories and histories.

Recently, I paused and jotted down some of these blessings I’ve received over the decades. For instance, kinfolk have provided information or documents freely and with good will. I took their gifts and used many of them to shape the stories and histories I wrote and gave as presents to them and many more family members. And a bigger blessing has been making and strengthening connections with family members.

Perhaps reading the lists I created will trigger even more of your memories of blessings you’ve received and who provided them.

Specific ways certain relatives have contributed to research/writing projects:

• Two aunts and two second cousins each shared with me years’ worth of their genealogical research.
• An uncle shared a grade-school essay he’d written 70 years earlier about his grandmother’s bunkhouse and it gave me insights into his life and that of my great-grandmother.
• An interview with a 96-year-old grandaunt about her mother provided surprising information about another of my great-grandmothers.
• When I wanted to write about my granduncle’s WWI military service, his son listed the military assignments and shared original postcards and letters with me.
• A second cousin took and sent me digital photos of family gravestones.
• When I wrote a story about my grandfather singing his favorite songs, an aunt sent me the lyrics of “Little Brown Jug” and “Patanio, the Pride of the Plains.”
• My half-sister provided a copy of my other grandfather’s 8-page handwritten history that included information I had known little about.
• And, after my grandmother’s death, we found among her Very Important Papers “My Last Will & Testiments,” that had been written by my younger sister when she was 10.

Some ways many relatives have provided too-many-to-count blessings:

• Copies of birth, marriage, and death certificates and land, wills, and probate documents
• Family recipes
• Photos identified with names, dates, and locations
• Interviews and oral family lore
• Family members’ letters, diaries, or histories—from one page to enough to fill a fat book
• Medical histories
• Mementoes
• Newspaper clippings

Relatives and others who blessed me, often without knowing they were doing so, by:

• Brainstorming possibilities
• Giving me time and space to pursue projects
• Pointing me in the right direction for whatever I was looking for and couldn’t find
• Showing me resources I wasn’t even looking for or didn’t know existed
• Giving feedback when my writing wasn’t clear, logic wasn’t logical, or facts weren’t correct
• Speaking or writing an encouraging word when I needed it most
• Teaching specific skills I needed
• Providing technical support

Many who blessed me are not family members, and some I’ve never met in person:

• Members of various genealogy and history societies
• Fellow members of writers groups
• Librarians and archivists
• Teachers of in-person or online classes, workshops, or seminars
• Indexers of records or those who attached records to digital family trees
• Dictionary lexicographers who helped me understand, use, choose, and spell words
• Authors of reference books
• Good writers who make me want to emulate them

One definition of blessings in the New Oxford American Dictionary is “a beneficial thing for which one is grateful; something that brings well-being.”

Counting the ways so many people have blessed me continues to be a beneficial thing, for it makes me feel like a team member. Remembering these blessings gives me resolve, persistence, and energy to play my part, which is gathering and sharing family stories and histories.

I hope your blessings are too many to count and ever increasing. And may you be a blessing as you collect and share your family stories.

• What are some specific ways others have contributed to your efforts as you collect and share your family’s stories?
• What are some categories of too-many-to-count contributions to your family’s stories and histories?
• How have others contributed to your efforts—perhaps without knowing they were doing so?