I am an only-child from traditionally small families on both sides, and rather than being dispersed as I think often happens in larger families, our family papers and heirlooms have been concentrated to me. Among these papers are some notes that my mother wrote in the 80’s, about her own childhood and other general recollections of life when she was young.

These longhand “memoirs” of her life in the 20’s and 30’s are fascinating to read today and they inspire me to do the same. These personal notes don’t have to be polished and publishable, and with modern MS-Word and spellchecker technology, it should be quite easy to do. In modern terms, I suppose it is a “retroactive blog”. My current outline for the project includes the following topics;

Memories of My Mother
Memories of My Father
Childhood Pets
Schools
Notable Toys & Technologies
Vacations & Pastimes
Friends & Loves
The Best Recollections & The Worst
My Life in the 60’s
My Life in the 70’s
My Life in the 80’s
My Life in the 90’s

Part of the intent is to leave a record of myself. Just chatting and reminiscing at family gatherings isn’t enough. People get the stories wrong, or just aren’t interested at the moment you happen to be ready to tell the tale, and they and forget. And just because the youngsters are not clamoring to hear your stories of life before they were born doesn’t mean that they won’t be interested 10-years after you are dead.

I am also interested in saving my memories for myself. I know that I have forgotten a lot of stuff, and I’m sure that I will forget more as I get older. My objective is to have these topics saved on my personal PC and archive the files to CD, but I’ll probably post some excerpts here too.