Connecting With Your Descendants: How to Make Sure Family Stories and Treasures Get Passed from Generation to Generation
How many stories about your great-great-grandparents have been passed down to you through the generations by word of mouth? How many objects belonging to your great-great grandparents have reached your generation? If the answer to these questions is more than zero then you are quite lucky. Most people have a family tradition that rarely goes past their great grandparents unless they are royalty or descendants of someone very famous. In my own case the oldest object of certain origin is a pot made by my great grandfather Robert Douglas Marr at the beginning of his career as a potter. The oldest stories that have reached me by word of mouth -- rather than official records -- are more or less from the same period. From the records I know that Robert's grandfather was a carpenter named Andrew Marr, born in 1785, but no relative that I know has any stories to tell about him, nor do any artifacts survive. I suspect that he never gave any thought to the problem, but if he tried to pa