Chapter One

Your Living Family Tree

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A Great New Idea, a Vision, and the Benefits

Let me share a great new idea just popping out of the 21^st century. You can easily and quickly create your own “living family tree”!

You know what a regular family tree is. It tells about your folks’ families, and their families: when and where they were born, who they married, information about their kids, and when and where they died.

Family trees usually go back until the roots disappear or get murky. They’re fun to read to see if there were knights or dukes among your kin—or if a horse thief was hanging from a stout branch!

But what if you could create a tree that started right now, grew forward for 100 or 1000 years, and drew every one of your living relatives—or yet to live—into a warm, tightly-bound clan?

You can. And you have almost every tool at hand because of the extraordinary electronic revolution we are experiencing.

The old-fashioned family tree is a real treasure but it has been limited to recording past dates and places, with a few tattered tintypes pasted in. Today, we can collect the actual words and actions (almost the souls) of every member of your family through sound, video, podcasts, .jpgs, and digital writing. Most important, everything collected can be easily organized and preserved, exactly as it is, to be instantly enjoyed by your cousin across the world or by your great-grandson’s cousin 60 or 100 years from now, after he is born and looking back to see what his ancestors (that’s you!) thought and did.

That’s about as close to magic as we can get. This book will give you the how-to details.

A Vision and Some Benefits

We need a plan, a vision, around which to create a living family tree. It’s your tree and you can design it any way you wish. But for starters, let’s imagine that your tree includes

* a core couple

* a director

* a nuclear website

* many information-sharing locations on the website

* a related email link for family members to submit information

* a submission guideline to provide some structural protocol for those submissions

* a family-shared plan for development and continual use of your living family tree

* perhaps a Family Board to help design and maintain the project

* possible family reunions to physically bring the living members together and expand the reach and sense of the living family tree

But first, why would you and your family even want a living family tree? Because it

* acknowledges the existence and importance of each member of each branch of your direct family and it directly links you to each of them

* lets each member share their personal thoughts, contributions, and achievements with other members of the living family

* conveys the sense of accomplishment and worth shared by each member

* provides to each relative while they are living or after they have passed a kind of historical intimacy (through voice, video, picture, and word)

* calls attention to the core family values that span the generations

* extends a sense of worth to every family member by having actively contributed to a family team project

* provides current, quickly updated family contact information

* accessibly preserves your family history in one place

* widely shares family-based wisdom and humor

* instils both family and personal pride and unity

There’s more too. A living family tree will provide a form of interwoven, intergenerational immortality. As long as the tree blooms, or exists, every family member can continue to live in the minds of those they love, through their achievements, pictures, writings, voice, and words. The tree can provide solace for the lonely, a buttress in grief, and an inspiration from others who succeeded to those needing succour, support, or encouragement. It could provide laughter, memories, and awe in children seeing themselves celebrated to their clan. And nobody in the family will be truly lost, forgotten, or unembraced.

Why hasn’t anybody thought of this before? For the same reason that nobody thought of retooling genes before we knew about DNA or nobody broadcast the Olympics before we had radio or TV!

Of course, somebody has to get the living family tree going. They must sow the first seed. Trees, however extraordinary, can’t plant themselves!

Do you want to be a legitimate family hero, revered for the next 100 or 500 years by your own flesh and blood? Plant the seed.

The idea is so new and makes so much sense somebody in your line is going to be the pioneer. We know that you already have more than enough wit and intelligence. All that’s missing is the know-how, and we’ll help there.

You’ll be the hero because you grasped the magic and had the gumption and tenacity to make it work for those you love most! Keep reading.

If you’re not the heroic type? Just send it to the smartest, bravest person in your family. Let them pick up the accolades, with of course a sage nod your direction for having made the first suggestion! One thing’s certain: your family will love having their own living family tree.

Think forward to see why that seed should be planted now. Not only will it start with a living couple (you or your parents?), it will multiply every time someone in your family has a child. Who knows how many branches it will have in 200, 500, or 1000 years. Best yet, if started now, you will be included, and gratefully thanked, by every one of those new family members. And what will they know about you? Everything you wish to share in words, photo, song, video, or artefacts.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.