Thinking About Family History Ahead of the Holidays

By Jessica L., Local History and Genealogy Librarian

The winter season often allows time for families to huddle together inside away from the cold and celebrate traditions, some of them going back generations.

If you’ve ever wondered about the story behind a family recipe, favorite family photo, or why in the world your grandfather and father gift fruitcake back and forth to each other every Christmas (just me? more on that later), this winter season is the perfect time to ask! At the Crossroads Discovery Center, we are ready to help you find your ancestors and get your family stories preserved for generations to come.

Genealogy

Searching for ancestors using our local resources or databases like Ancestry.com (available in the library) is a great way to start family conversations during time with loved ones this season. Asking questions like:

• “Where was grandpa born?”
• “What was Aunt so-and-so’s maiden name?”
• “What did grandma do for a living?”
• “Why did my great-grandfather come to America?”

 

can help to gather data for doing family history research. Interviewing a family member for information like this can help solve lots of puzzles about where you and your ancestors came from and what their lives were like. Here at the library, we offer a space to help record these family stories (in our audio recording lab) and resources on how to conduct oral histories.

Preserving Artifacts

Treasured artifacts like handwritten family recipes or photos, besides being important to preserve, can also give clues for doing family history research. Identifying people in photos and when and where they were taken is invaluable to getting clues. For example, if there’s a horse and buggy in the photo, it’s likely from before the 1920s. If, like in my family, there’s a lot of family recipes that are actually torn from magazines and newspapers, finding dates on these sources might help solve a mystery of when family traditions started or who might have made the first “classic” version of this recipe. If you’ve got the story behind a photo or other artifact, the Crossroads Discovery Center is a great place to make sure they get saved forever. With our image digitization lab, you can make digital files of these and record audio files tied to the images to tell the story in a slideshow form (which you can then play at your next family gathering!).

Learning About Traditions

As I mentioned previously, winter is a great time to examine family traditions, as they sometimes add deeper meaning to your family story. For example, growing up, I always knew Christmas at my dad’s parents’ house would inevitably involve either my grandpa or my dad opening a gift of a frozen fruitcake. Some years, there were other “useful” gifts, like whoopie cushions, a calendar for the next year with goats or giraffes doing yoga, etc. The story goes that this tradition started between my dad and his brother when one year, one of them was gifted a store-bought, not very good, fruitcake from the other – a completely random gift, a “gag gift” if you will. The next year, revealing that it had been in the freezer for almost the entire time, it was re-gifted to the other brother. This happened multiple years. After my dad’s brother passed away in 2004, my grandfather kept the tradition alive by gifting my father more and more ridiculous gifts. My dad would always include a gag gift as well, and it would always be hilarious to try to figure out if the gift in question had been given in sincerity (“Why, are you saying you don’t need a rubber chicken?”) and what they would do to retaliate the next year. One year they managed to gift each other the EXACT same ridiculous calendar. The best years were when someone decided to go back to the classic – fruitcake, freezer burnt and completely inedible.

Now, it turns out that this is not a tradition unique to my family, based on a search of our database Newspapers.com. Both locals and others around the country have been joking about fruitcakes for decades, and it’s likely that the family joke was inspired by this.

Along the way, I also found recipes for fruitcake that might not meet the traditional inedible reputation. Researching here at the library helped give me even more background on my family story!

My grandfather passed away this year, and that story, among many others, is exactly the type of tradition that helps add meaning to the season. Preserving stories, artifacts, and knowledge about family history is a great way to pass those long winter nights and keep warm with laughter.

The Crossroads Discovery Center provides the opportunity to get your research started, continue the journey, or find out something you never thought you’d learn. We hope to see you soon!