Recording our Past V

In 2009 I started posting articles about recording our past.
Today I am posting a long overdue part IV post.

Recording memories.

Senses play a large roll in our memory.

The sense of smell is perhaps the strongest. A whiff of perfume or aftershave, the smell of a certain soap, flowers or a special food can trigger a long forgotten memory.
When you encounter a familiar smell, it may spark an entire memory from your past.
When the memory returns, write it down.
I remember a scene from a Waltons show concerning the family of Grandpa's older brother. His wife was reminiscing about her husband and remembering the smell of Bay Rum on her wedding day. Her soon to be husband had went to the barber that morning and the barber had applied Bay Rum after giving him his haircut and shave. (Bay Rum aftershave has been around since 1838).
Honeysuckle grew on the path down to my Grandpa Woods' house. The scent of it brings back  memories of visiting him when I was a small child.

The sense of taste brings back memories. Foods from when you or your family were young, such as a certain medicine, candy, baked bread, stacked applesauce cake, etc. can spark memories from the past.

The sense of sight also brings back memories. Going back to where you used to live or attended school, looking at old pictures or home movies or watching old movies may bring in a flood of memories.

Why do we remember some things and forget others? We have selective memories. Our firsts, events that had a big impact on us or a very emotional event will  likely be something that we remember.

I have found that when I would ask an older  relative a general question such as, what was it like when you were younger - they won't remember a thing. So I ask specific questions.
Both of you will be surprised at the memories that flood back.

Laura of Little House fame had a memory book. We should all have a memory book to write down our memories in and to write down the memories of other family members, so our past will not be forgotten.

The next time you get a whiff of something and it brings back a memory - write it down.
The next time you taste a familiar food and it brings back a memory - write it down.
The next time you see a picture of days past and it brings back a memory - write it down.

Make a Memory Jar. Type a list of questions, run them off on your computer and cut them into strips. Fold them and put in a mason jar (I like to use a wide mouth one). Take one question out each week and glue or tape it onto a page in a notebook and write down your answers.

Make more than one and give them to other family memories, especially the older ones, and tell them to do the same. Soon you will have a collection of memories.

 

I have two word documents I would be glad to email to anyone who wants them. One tells you how to make and  label the memory jar and the other is a list of questions. All you have to do is print them off, cut into strips and put into your jar. You can add to or delete any of the questions to fit your family better. Either email me or leave your email in a comment if you want me to send those files to you.

We need to keep family stories alive!

Go here for my other posts about recording our past.

Posted byJanet Smart   on Writing in the Blackberry Patch.


 

Recording Our Past IV

This is my third article about recording our past. I am slowly putting together our family history. If you are fairly new to my blog you can go here for my post about keeping track of family heirlooms and here to see my post about old family photos.

Today I am posting about food customs and traditions. Every family has their own memories about their food customs and traditions. Below are my memories and, I bet, you probably have some of the same memories as I have.

There were no fast food places in the old days. Our families never ate out as they do today. Women cooked three meals a day. Baked bread of some sort had a place on the table at every meal. The rolling pin was a much used utensil in the kitchen and my grandma always wore an apron.

The red handled rolling pin was my Aunt Irma's. She had it since she was married in the late 1940s.

The old hand carved one was my moms. She gave it to me when I married.

Flour was bought in 25 lb. bags. Recipes were not always written down and ingredients were put in by the handfuls, instead of careful measuring.

Potatoes, pinto beans and bread were staples at the kitchen table. A huge pot of cooked beans lasted for several days. Neighborhood kids were often sent home with a buttered piece of cornbread in their hands. Fried apples and biscuits were a favorite and leftovers were eaten for breakfast the next day.

I remember visiting relative's homes for Sunday dinners. Colorful tablecloths were spread over the food after eating a meal. It kept flies off and enabled you to come back for leftovers later.

At Christmas, there were not always lots of presents to open up, but there were usually oranges, mixed nuts, chocolate balls, hard candy and lots of pies. Thin pies were stacked on top of each other and baked.

On New Years Day, everyone in our area of Appalachia cooked cabbage with a silver coin placed in it. The person who ended up with the silver in their serving, had luck in money the following year, or so they said. I believe it was also a way to get children to eat their cabbage.

On Easter, eating salty fish and eggs for breakfast was a tradition where I grew up. Mr. Walker's store had kegs of fish in salty brine. You would take them home, scale and bone them, and soak them overnight to get the salty taste out of them.

The applesauce stack cake was a favorite of our family. Layers upon thin layers were baked and stacked on top of each other with applesauce spread in between. If you did not have applesauce, apple butter or even jelly was spread in its place. Grandma made 'sweet cakes' out of any left over dough and put them in Grandpa's and Uncle Doc's lunch the next day. Grandma was not the only one who made them, so did my Aunts. Below is the OLD TIME STACK CAKE recipe that my Aunt Goldie put in the Walker Chapel Church cookbook in the early 1970s. Of course, you roll out many layers, and when stacking you spread applesauce between the layers. It is best if it sits covered for a day or two in the refrigerator before eating.

This cookbook is a treasure in itself. 

It is filled with recipes from my family members.

Grandma made these stack cakes all  the time. They were delicious. I remember coming in the back kitchen door and she would have the cake sitting on the table. She would cut me a piece and I gobbled it down.

Everyone canned, and they canned everything imaginable. I remember washing the canning jars outside in a large galvanized tub filled with hot sudsy water. Sausage was cooked, usually in round balls,  put in canning jars and hot grease was poured over them. They would then turn the jars upside down until the grease became cold and solid. They put away green beans, corn, tomatoes, chow chow, pickles and peaches for the winter. Grandma won ribbons for her blackberries,cherries, tomato preserves,  watermelon and blackberry preserves and blackberry jelly at school fairs in the 1930s. She was also hired by the state to go to people and teach them how to can.

The canned food was stored on shelves in cellars along with the baskets of potatoes and apples.

People lived off the land. Blackberry vines abounded on Grandma's land and they were picked and canned as is or made into jam and jelly. Cobblers were a favorite dessert during the summer.

Apples were made into apple butter. The family gathered in the cool fall air and cooked it in a large kettle over an open fire. It was a big undertaking and took all day. Grandma wrapped her 1891 silver dollar in a hanky and it was thrown into the kettle to keep the apple butter from sticking.
If you beat the squirrels to them, hickory nuts and black walnuts were harvested from the woods.

We raised our own chickens and pigs. Pig slaughtering day was a big event in the fall. They used everything from the pig except the 'squeal.' Ham, sausage, bacon, brains, lard rendered from the fat, feet and cracklins.

Chickens provided people with eggs and they were also the main dish for Sunday dinner!

Cows provided us with butter and milk. A churn and butter mold was a staple in the country kitchen.

One way to preserve your food history is to put together a family cookbook. I have gathered recipes from family members twice and put together a cookbook. The books are filled with pictures, recipes from the past and present and food memories that were shared to me by my cousins. It is a labor of love and worth the time spent in putting it together. It doesn't have to be bound professionally, a spiral notebook works very well, and it also makes it easy to add new recipes.

I have put the recipes from my first family cookbook here on my genealogy site.

Do you share some of the same food memories as I have? Have you ever put together a family cookbook?

Recording Our Past III. . .

Maybe I should call this post Recording Our Present for Our Future Generations, and an easy and fun way to do that is with our recipes.

Gather family recipes and make a family cook book. I've did this twice, once in 1996 and then again in 2005. I wish someone had did it many years sooner.

Sometimes it's hard to get everyone to cooperate, but then the ball starts rolling and you get lots coming in.

You can have them professionally printed, but I didn't. I simply typed them and printed them out on my computer. In addition to putting the name of the contributor of the recipe, I also wrote down their relationship to my grandparents. Such as:

CRUSHED PINEAPPLE PIE
by: Janet (Woods) Smart
Granddaughter

In my 1996 cookbook, I typed the title page, a page with the pictures of my grandparents and gr grandparents and a page with our family tree printed on it. These recipes were gathered from the descendants of my maternal grandparents. The recipes from our first cookbook is on my genealogy page here.

In 2006, in addition to recipes from living family members, I asked everyone if they could remember recipes made by their parents, grandparents, aunts etc. They could submit them in memory of them. Such as:

OLD TIME STACK CAKE
by: Janet (Woods) Smart
Granddaughter (in memory of
Aunt Goldie)

I got a few older recipes that way. On those recipes, I also put a picture of the person it was in memory of.

This information kind of made it more personal. Also, throughout the book I typed in tidbits of food memories from our past.

I told about apple butter making down at grandma's when we were kids, how grandma used to teach people how to can, how we made homemade ice cream from new fallen snow, grandma's old time stack cake and other food related memories. I've been told by some family members that those written memories was one of their favorite parts of the cookbook.

Here is a sample page:




The front of the book has a picture of my grandparents in the middle:


I guess you could put them on a disc and distribute the disc to everyone, but I'm a little old fashioned and I like hard copies. I like to have a book to hold in my hands.

So whether you get them done professionally or do it on your own, consider making a book of your family recipes, you won't regret it. It will be a cookbook treasured and used forever that will become an heirloom passed down through the generations.

Do you have a family cookbook you would like to tell us about?

Recording Our Past II

Pictures! I love pictures of my ancestors. I don't have a lot, but the ones I have have been gathered from relatives. Some of mine are originals, but most are copies of the originals. If you have a printer/scanner you can scan the originals and save them to your computer and/or print them out. . . or

one thing I've done is make copies at Staples. They are very reasonable with their prices. I believe it is just a little over $1 for an 8x10 sheet on photo paper. What I do is loosely put tape on the back of the original photos and attach them to an 8x10 sheet of paper. That way you can get 4,5,6, etc. copies for the price of one sheet. Cut them out and put them in picture frames or photo albums.

a sample of a sheet of photos I had scanned at Staples

I like displaying mine in vintage looking frames. I've gotten a lot of them at yard sales for 25 or 50 cents each. Sometimes stores will discount their frames, go to that section of the store regularly and check it out for discounts. I like the one below which looks like a coffee pot, I am going to find a picture of my grandpa to put in that frame. Why not Grandma, you ask? Well my grandpa was known for something he always said. When working on something if it didn't come out just right he would say "that's all right, we'll set the coffee pot on it."


Here are some I already have in frames. I grouped all of these together to take a picture of them. You could have a special table in your house to display your pictures or place them throughout the house. My cousin had a special table set up to display her old pictures on and I loved the way she did that, it really looked nice.


Of course, I'm sure most of you have a shoe box or tin filled with pictures. Most of us older readers anyway. Now a days things are so different with digital cameras and all. Go through them and see what you've got. It would be a good idea to put them in photo albums so they would be easier to look at and enjoy. (looks like that's something I need to do). If your mother or grandmother has a box of photos, you could 'borrow' them and arrange them in a nice photo album for her. Put them in chronological order from oldest to newest and surprise her with the finished product.


You always hope when going through old pictures that the backs of them look like this. . . with information written on them telling who they are, the date and place. But unfortunately you will find a lot of pictures with no info on the back of them. If you do and you don't know who they are pictures of or when they were taken, ask other family members for information. . . before it's too late. As I said in my other post, people forget.


It's a good idea, even on more recent pictures, to put names and dates on them. My youngest and oldest son looked very much alike when they were babies. When looking at some of their pictures now, I sometimes find it difficult to tell who it is in the picture. And since the youngest wore the older boys' hand me downs that makes it even more difficult.

Visit relatives and look for pictures. You can borrow them to make copies. Share pictures that you have. If no information is written on them, find out the names, the dates etc. and write it down. If you don't want to write on the backs of the pictures, write down the information and attach it or store it with the pictures. You could take a picture of the photo with the information beside of it, print this in black and white on regular paper from your printer and put it in your family memory book for safe keeping.

I have told my children who the pictures are of, but that is no guarantee they will remember 20 or 30 years from now.

I hope I've given you ideas to inspire you in recording your past.

Recording Our Past

I have mementos of my family as I am sure all of you do. I have found a way for me to keep a record of them. It is important, because sometimes people forget if things are not written down.

I am in the process of taking pictures of my family items that I don't want my children or grandchildren (whenever they may come) to ever get rid of.

Things such as the old rolling pin, pie pan, mixing bowl and biscuit cutters that Mom gave me to use after I was married. . .



Charley's dad's aluminum lunch box that he used when he worked at Carbide a long time ago. . .


A lot of us are not fortunate enough to have items from our distant ancestors. Items you record can be mementos from your childhood days or your childrens' childhood days.

I am downloading the pictures to my desktop and then copying them into microsoft word and writing beneath each picture what they are, who they originally belonged to and any history I might know about each item.

When I am finished, I will print off the pages and put them into a notebook devoted to this project. I have titled mine, MEMORIES OF OUR PAST.

Here is the type of notebook that works very well for this project. It is a 3 ring binder that has a plastic sleeve on the front of it. You could run off the title page and slip it into the sleeve. You can buy these in all sizes.



Print your pages, punch holes and put them into the notebook.




You think you will always remember, but take my word for it. . . people forget!

Do this so items you want to keep, and are a part of your family, do not get accidentally donated, thrown away or sold at a yard sale in the future. If this information gets recorded along with the pictures, it can keep something like that from happening.

I hope maybe I have given you an idea as to what you can do to keep track of your family mementos.

This is the first of a series of posts I will be doing about Recording Our Past.

I have posted a poem here about growing up in Appalachia. If you want, go read about where I am From. . .