Transforming Family Legends: from Past to Print

Were you a kid who enjoyed listening to your grandparents tell stories about their younger days, and about their parents and grandparents before them?  If so, you probably have a huge archive of family stories in your memory bank.  You may also wish that someone would write these family legends down for future generations.  But you don’t think that someone is you.

Family legends convey family values, humor, challenges, strengths, and mistakes in an entertaining way.  Ideally, legends and genealogy research can be combined into a family book, but both must first be collected and recorded.

At our Assembly session on Saturday, September 6, learn how you can be the one who records the family’s ancestral legends. Legends that don’t hold up to genealogy research, but are still valuable tales to be preserved.  The stories, as you remember them, may provide clues for new areas of research.

My way of working is to use old-style tools like binders, paper and pen to organize materials, and indeed to print an actual, not digital, family memory book. But where to begin?

  Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Perhaps consider writing your own story.  The best way I’ve found to proceed is to recall the first house you remember living in.  Describe it.  Who lived there: siblings, parents, grandparents, your eccentric great-aunt?  Tell about your early memories, about neighbors and friends who came to your house. More memories will flow from there. Write as you would speak if you were sitting with grandchildren who were hanging on your every word.

In advance of our session, participants will receive a “Family Legends Guide” outlining how to get started. Come with family stories, photos and heirlooms to share. We’ll also brainstorm ideas on developing an online digital archive of O’Donovan lore.  See you in Skibbereen!

Randa Phillips, Founding Secretary, O’Donovan Clan Cultural Association.

Randa grew up in Oklahoma.  All four of her grandparents were children when their families homesteaded there.  She loved hearing their stories of the early days, surviving the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s, and how their lives changed during the WWII years.

Family legends are the likely reason she was drawn to language arts and history in school.  That eventually led to teaching English and History to Junior High School students.  After retiring she dabbled in genealogy, but the life stories and history of each family’s times were what really drew her.  Eventually, she and a cousin who is an accomplished genealogist collaborated on a book for that side of the family.

Randa has helped people who thought they couldn’t write become authors who are comfortable writing about family histories as well as their own growing-up memories.  She is looking forward to meeting clan members from around the world at this year’s O’Donovan Clan Cultural Assocation Assembly, hearing as many of their stories as possible, and sharing what she has learned about recording family legends with them.

West Cork summer. Photo: Daniel O’Driscoll