Caring For Your Family Heritage: 5 Best Ways to Preserve Your Family Memories

A lot of people love hearing stories from their older relatives, and for a good reason. Our grandpas and grandmas are the keepers of our family memories and learning more about your common past from them is lots of fun. But, at the same time, we also have a responsibility to preserve these memories ourselves, so that the future generations will know more about their heritage.This article will help you find the best way to do just that – make your familial memories immortal.

Design a Family Tree  

Visualizing your familial connections either on paper has been the go-to method for immortalizing your ancestry for centuries. You may even feel like a medieval nobility yourself when going all the way up to generation five or six. On top of that, nowadays you can also build your family tree online, as customisable as it gets. You can insert all kinds of photos, choose from different fonts and colors and, when all is done, you can print your family tree out and frame it. And don’t worry if your tree doesn’t stretch very far – we don’t all have the privilege of a well documented family history. Regardless of its size, all the hard work of a genealogical research and then the execution will surely make the end result very satisfying.

Start a Blog to Preserve Family History

 

These days, you can find blogs dedicated to practically any topic, and family memories are no exception. Genealogy blogs have only been growing in popularity, because there is just so much you can do with them. Not only do you get to document your family members’ lives, but also you get to share all that info with the outside world. And you don’t have to stop at just posting funny family stories, you can go full-on genealogical researcher. Aligning your ancestors’ lives with historic events, interviewing your oldest living relative, highlighting similarities between generations, putting your instant discoveries out there – all that and much more you can do with a genealogy blog. 

Start Journaling

 

Journaling, in essence, has a similar premise to blogging, with the key difference of it being personal, just for you and your family to read. It’s really up to you whether you want to go digital or old-school – both methods offer something different, while still achieving the goal of keeping your family memories well recorded. It is very exciting to realize that whatever happened to you or your loved ones on a certain day can be read by your distant descendants decades later. And it can all have your personal spin on it, too – it doesn’t have to be a dry, polished documentary-like collection of stories. You don’t have to push yourself to record every day, either. All that matters is that you have fun while putting down your family holiday memories, your grandma’s stories, your children’s misadventures and other kinds of family heritage.

Continue Family Traditions

 

Does your mom still make that killer of a meat pie on Christmas? Or, maybe your dad still drives you to that one special place every year? Well, that cake may as well be a recipe that is decades old, passed on from generation to generation, and that place may be where your grandpa used to take his family too. Traditions are the heart and soul of a family and it’s very important to keep them alive. You must have heard many stories connected to them throughout your life and the stories of your own will be a new chapter in your family history. And it’s only cooler if these traditions revolve around creating something – in this case, by now your household should have an array of real family artifacts. And if you don’t have many familial traditions to boast about, why not come up with your own? In that case, you don’t just get to be the one to pass the tradition on, you get to be the one it all started from. 

Family History Book 

 

Sounds like a very serious and, perhaps, even daunting task – when we think of a family history book, we probably think of a very thick old-looking book with hundreds of pages of text. But, in reality, it doesn’t have to be that. One of the easier and more fun ways to organize your family history book can be putting together a photo book. Choose a theme you want to illustrate or a narrative you want to tell and go dig into your familial archive to find pictures that fit the format you’ve outlined. For instance, you can cover one person’s biography, or document the history of your family reunions or family vacations. And then label or tag the photos with names, dates and stories, so that the rich imagery can be supplemented by texts. And if you don’t have too many family photos, you can always try and narrate your family history with the help of more text or even some items like familial artifacts.

Conclusion

Memories are some of the most valuable possessions a family can have, and it’s very important that these possessions aren’t lost. Luckily, there are many easy and fun ways to preserve those memories: you can use a family tree builder, start writing a blog, a journal, or even a whole family history book, or just keep your favorite traditions alive – just choose whatever works best for you and your descendants will thank you for that.

CREATE YOUR FAMILY TREE