Thank you to all who followed us during the month of October for Family History Month! We hope our ideas on how to archive your family history were helpful to you. As you may have noticed, we did not attain our goal of posting daily, as life/other work got in the way. We apologize for this - but also want you to know that we fully understand why pictures get piled up, why we forget to get the stories from our elders, why there’s never any time to put it all together. That’s why we started this business! We know the challenges firsthand and want to work with you to record your family’s stories, to build your family archive over time, as it’s a project that’s always growing.
In this inaugural November post, we want to talk about Thanksgiving Day itself. This is often the one day a year that different generations gather together under the same roof. We eat traditional foods (the tradition depends on the family - we always had rice and probably pancit, next to the roasted turkey and green beans). Some families (mine now) watch football on the couch, stuffed from lunch or waiting for dinner. Other Thanksgivings are made up of friends, friends-givings birthed from college days when we could choose to go home for either Thanksgiving or Christmas, and we chose the one where we’d have the longer break. Friends-givings developed, and we called home for the recipes we wanted to share/show off with.
In pop culture, Thanksgiving dinners are often an opportunity to display family dysfunction (with humor or not), perhaps because bringing adult children back to their childhood home can regress them to childhood behaviors and dynamics that they thought they grew out of. Or the idea of gathering multiple generations under the same roof, each of which grew up in a different time and different set of values - but belonging to the same family, each member expects that the others of their clan should share their worldview.
No matter what scene is more familiar to you, here at FamilyArchive we think the day presents itself with an excellent opportunity to record your traditions. Thanksgiving is traditionally a time to celebrate the harvest, and break bread (or cornbread!) at a communal table. Over the next month we’ll post ideas for how you can gather and contribute to your family archive and build new traditions to bring your family together, whether it’s the one you were born into or created through friendship. We’ll also post on the things we’re grateful for, and of course, food! Follow our blog, Facebook page, and/or Twitter to receive updates of our new posts, and subscribe to our newsletter for special member offers and news.
We look forward to hearing your stories - as always, contact us for personalized service and when you want to put all your gathered materials together!
Writing Prompt: What does your typical Thanksgiving table look like? Whose table have you gathered around, and who sits around the table?