Selected excerpts from
Your Living
Family Tree
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We only get so many years of happiness,
giving, and love on this earth, then we’re gone. Sorry. A hundred years from
now all that most of us will be is a name and a few myths...
What if we could select what our
great-great-great-grandchildren know about us? What if we could share forever
our awe at seeing our children born, the horror of experiencing 9/11, what it
was like to win the spelling bee―or anything heartfelt at the moment it
took place?
It’s the 21st century, the
miracle era of easy and inexpensive digital preservation. There’s no reason
that we and every living member of our family can’t leave a written, visual,
oral, and active presence of our own choosing to be enjoyed, appreciated, and
learned from by both present family members and offspring far into the future!
There’s no reason we can’t create our own
Living Family Tree, planted this week and fed and trimmed for the next 100,
200, 500, or 1,000 years by our kids, their kids, and so on…
To do that we need a structure around
which we can build the family exchange, we must give it continuity, and we need
a process by which all family members (who wish to) can participate in and preserve
the new project almost forever.
Let’s create and plant a family tree that
will unite all of the members from this day forward.
But let’s also fill our new living family
tree with sound, written memories, digital photos, videos, and things made or
worn by our family. Let’s inject all of the living senses we can capture and
keep them alive, at least digitally, forever!
Let’s hear your thoughts at five, see you
and your sisters joking around the Christmas tree, watch you play basketball on
the school team, read your dissertation, then your book, see your family grow,
watch the entirety of your life unfold—now or 250 years from now.
Best yet, that new-millennial tree with
100 more lives like yours would be instantly and forever accessible at any hour
to any family member because it’s planted as close as the nearest computer.
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.
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.
Of course, somebody has to get the living
family tree going. They must sow the first seed. Trees, however extraordinary,
can’t plant themselves!
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!
We are standing on terra incognita. Nobody knows what a perfect living family tree is
yet. None exists as I write these words.
That’s because this tree grows from mental
seeds that are free of genetic restraints, so new genes (or mutations) are as
easy to create as changing a word or stretching a vision.
You create your own living family tree.
You are encouraged to graft new branches or change those configurations at
will.
A living family tree needs more than just
a trunk. It might include a Personal Information Repository, a Family
Directory, a Key Date List, a Family Registry, “Tip of the Hat” Acclamations, “In
Memoriam” Announcements, an Annual Family Summary, Family Treasures in Print, a
Family Treasure Box, Family Flashes, an Ancestral Family Tree, Journals,
Diaries, Memoirs, Scrapbooks, Unforgettable Recollections, and a Family
Submission Guide.
The success of your living
family tree is directly related to the level and amount of buy-in from the
family, and every idea, comment, or suggestion is one more element of that
buy-in.
Your living family tree is a website that
brings alive and maintains vibrant every member from today forward.
What’s unique today is not only can we
share and indefinitely retain a ton of instantly accessible information about
our family, we can do it so many different ways!
What a change! Not only are we reversing
the direction, by planning forward, there is so much diversity that half of our
task is just staying ahead of the emerging technology.
Somebody must be at the helm creating and
initially directing the whole thing, and later a process must be designed to
keep its leadership vital far into the future..
If you pull it off, if you get your own
family’s living tree up and growing, there is a HUGE REWARD that will be yours
only, and almost forever. You will be the genius, a family hero for 200 or 500
years. You will be the mastermind, the legend, who had the tenacity, foresight,
and skills to launch this family treasure!
Starting it is the single most important
step. The second most important is tending the tree so that it blooms and grows
straight and tall almost forever.
The quickest way to launch your living
family tree is for some hero to design it, set it up, and get it going while
all along getting family input as it grows in size, stature, and desirability.
But a powerful counter argument says that
nothing would launch an LFT project faster or keep it on track better than a
family reunion.
The whole idea of capturing a person’s
soul (in a sort of physical way; at least some of their living memories, words,
laughter, and on-the-spot wisdom) while their heart still beats does hint at a
ticking clock. So, in a quest to seize singularity while it is seizable, those
with the longest time cards must move to the top of the list.
As must new tykes when they enter your
family and the world, since that must be captured at or around the moment.
If there’s a sensible time priority, then,
consider beginning with the ends and moving quickly to the center. Every family
member counts, all are important, but some really are more important than
others right now.
Some families will demand that you display
extraordinary ingenuity and flexibility before they will even look at such an
odd project as a living family tree. Other families will shriek (politely) with
delight and dig right in. Some won’t even be that polite.
Most families will probably do a little of
all: ignore, nod, applaud, and/or yelp with gusto.
And when the project is put together from
whole cloth, from “what if" and “why can’t we?”, the now is pretty much
when you declare that it has begun—like when a family website exists and
there’s something on it. The future is from that point forward.
So if nobody plants the tree at all, you
and all your direct relatives and all their get will miss out on the many
benefits of being remembered, admired, respected, learned from, and modelled after
for a long, long, long time.
If indeed (such a living family tree) binds
family members together; creates a spirit of genetic union and pride; displays
true life … and affords every member an honest historical seat at the family
table (a sort of in-house immortality that proves they lived and tried), it’s
hard to imagine that the honor of directing such an entity wouldn’t be much
sought by those within the family, particularly after its existence has become
a worthy, comfortable tradition.
Only as the twenty-first century unfolds
does a living family tree make much sense. So it is hard to imagine at the cusp
of the new possibility, of preserving ourselves and our living relatives
multi-dimensionally forever, how many more changes are in store even in our own
lifetime, much less that of our grandchildren, and theirs.
All of which begs the question that this
book asks: Just because at last we can create and maintain a living family
tree, should we?
The answer is yes.
And today is the very day to get it
started.
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The printed version and the digital download (in
Adobe format) of the book are available right now!
SATISFACTION GUARANTEED:
If this book isn’t more than we promise, send the book back for a full refund,
even if it grew leaves. No questions asked, but we may laugh a bit.
Want to take a quick look at the
Introduction or the first chapter?
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Paper trade, $15.95 (print) or $12.95 (digital) 6” x 9” / 176 pages ISBN 978-0979629549 (Print) ISBN 978-0979629556 (Adobe) |
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