Introduction
Your Living Family Tree
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...
We’ll be like Great Aunt Maude who might
have been a spinster or maybe Uncle Albert’s mother, and is she buried in
We may as well
write our lives in invisible ink!
Forget all the fun and the good deeds and
sacrifices. Forget that every one of our lives is unique and singular. That we
work hard and are kind to dogs and widows and that we deserve to be remembered.
Poof and we’re hundred-year dust!
Wouldn’t it be
great if we could reverse that?
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?
Then let’s do it!
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.
Bingo. That’s what
this book describes!
Let’s create and plant a family tree that
will unite all of the members from this day forward.
But not an old-fashioned, one-dimensional
family tree limited to lists of dead kin. That tree points backward and
downward, until the roots disappear. We need a “living family tree” that starts
today, points upward and forward, is open-ended, and invites participation by
every family member and generation yet to come.
Then the old-fashioned family tree can be
included, a much researched root revered by the family living now and yet to
come. The future research will be a lot easier: we, while we are alive, will
provide it.
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, later 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.
Are there other
benefits beyond immortality?
At least a baker’s dozen plus six, as
you’ll see later. Let me talk about one benefit particularly worth sharing at
the outset.
If you could help a cousin still to be
born 100 years in the future live a much better life, or stay out of trouble,
or do something extraordinary just because of an example you left in print (or
by audio or video), would that get your attention?
And if the situation were reversed and you
were desperately seeking some guidance or an up-from-the-bootstraps example,
you were looking at the “living family tree,” and there was something
inspirational from some cousin who lived 130 years earlier… You get the idea.
A “living family tree” with everybody
contributing during their life has so much more potential than just keeping us
eternally waving at relatives. It lets each member of the extended family share
their life, heart, and experiences with every other member somewhere in time.
How does all of this happen?
Who sets it up?
Who keeps the website family tree
fertilized and growing?
How can we join in?
Is changing the direction of family
history really this easy?
Read on…