Tweets and texts have their place in a family’s communication network, but your grandkids are unlikely to come across them some day in the attic.
That’s why a local author worries about how family stories will be shared decades from now.
“I wonder about the future,” Diane Green-Hartley said. “People don’t keep journals any more. There’s no paper trail.”
She was able to bring new life to her family’s role in American history through words that were set down on paper almost a century ago. Those journal entries and letters between family members resulted in her book, “Lillie’s Jasper: The 1930 Pilgrimage of a Gold Star Mother.”
(Author John Graham just asked her for permission to use two of her images in an article he is writing for National Genealogical Society Magazine.)
Now, with families getting together for the holidays, the topic of preserving and sharing their common heritage is timely. Gatherings are opportunities to remind siblings and cousins who has grandma’s old diary or the bundle of letters mom and dad wrote in 1944.
And don’t forget oral histories.
“I had an amazing story play out at a museum in Madras, Ore.,” she told The Columbian during an interview for an Nov. 24 story. The trigger was a World War II F4 Corsair fighter in the Erickson Aircraft Collection at the Madras airport.
“An elderly man asked, ‘Can I look inside?'”
After officials gave the OK, “My husband helped him get into the cockpit,” Green-Hartley said. “Once he was inside, it was like he was 20 years old.”
Not only was he right at home in the cockpit, but he started talking about a memorable moment in 1945, when Japan surrendered in a ceremony in Tokyo Bay.
“His squadron had flown over the USS Missouri at the surrender,” she said.
As the man was reliving that day, Green-Hartley recalled a bystander yelling: “Somebody record this!”
Which certainly reflects what she calls her “passion to preserve irreplaceable voices from the past.”
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.
