My wife was back in Canada on business a few weeks ago and made arrangements to meet my two nieces for dinner after the meetings were finished. That's how I found out that one of my nieces was going through a divorce. Melanie is a sweet woman, 32 years old and has been married to her husband since they graduated from high school. Her husband is a nice guy but they realized quite a while ago that they married each other to get away from their respective homelives, both having grown up in strict religious households. They both decided to stop living a lie a few years ago and are now formally going their separate ways while they're still young enough to start over.
It's tough to start over and Melanie needed a break so we invited her down for a week in Bermuda, sent her a plane ticket and she spent the past week staying with us, a Wonderful Time. I've moved around a lot over the past few decades and family, especially extended family relationships tend to suffer as a result. It was good to have a week to catch up on the life of my niece and for her to catch up with her uncle. This is where the story part comes into play.
Melanie's parents censored and sanitized her family history because of their religious beliefs which left some rather large holes in Melanie's personal history. What her ancestors were like, her own background and a lot of just plain old family stuff. It wasn't long after Melanie arrived in Bermuda before I started getting bombarded with questions about our family history. Fortunately, I had copies of some of the stories I have written for this forum and some of them relate to my family history. I printed off copies and gave them to Melanie to read and this really helped. It helped to fill in a lot of the blanks that were left out of her life by the censorship of her religious parents, nothing terrible or anything like that but just stuff that you would espect everyone to know about themselves and their family. The fact that the stories were written down long before the questions were asked of me gave the information in the stories more weight as well.
I think now of some of the stories my Mom and Dad have told me about their parents and grandparents and it makes me think that I would be wise to capture these stories before they are lost to the grave or censored out of existence.
Keep Writing All,
It's tough to start over and Melanie needed a break so we invited her down for a week in Bermuda, sent her a plane ticket and she spent the past week staying with us, a Wonderful Time. I've moved around a lot over the past few decades and family, especially extended family relationships tend to suffer as a result. It was good to have a week to catch up on the life of my niece and for her to catch up with her uncle. This is where the story part comes into play.
Melanie's parents censored and sanitized her family history because of their religious beliefs which left some rather large holes in Melanie's personal history. What her ancestors were like, her own background and a lot of just plain old family stuff. It wasn't long after Melanie arrived in Bermuda before I started getting bombarded with questions about our family history. Fortunately, I had copies of some of the stories I have written for this forum and some of them relate to my family history. I printed off copies and gave them to Melanie to read and this really helped. It helped to fill in a lot of the blanks that were left out of her life by the censorship of her religious parents, nothing terrible or anything like that but just stuff that you would espect everyone to know about themselves and their family. The fact that the stories were written down long before the questions were asked of me gave the information in the stories more weight as well.
I think now of some of the stories my Mom and Dad have told me about their parents and grandparents and it makes me think that I would be wise to capture these stories before they are lost to the grave or censored out of existence.
Keep Writing All,
