February 2025 President's Message
I can’t help myself but I have to say it, time goes by so fast! It’s already February and it seems we just celebrated the holidays. In my computer business, I work primarily with seniors and if the concept of time comes up in the conversation, my customers say “just wait- the older you get- the faster time goes by”. And now that I am getting older, that advice seems to ring true. I wonder if our ancestors had the same concept of time? I wonder if they ever consid ered that many, many years later their descendants would be interested in learning about their life story. How did our ancestors perceive the time they were taking the month’s long journey across the Atlantic Ocean to come to America? Or the month’s long journey over the vast plains of America to get to their new homestead land in the west?
Today, we live in a different era where travel takes literally hours rather than months. This discussion about time is relevant to us because we all age. As our life passes, our time on this Earth is finite. The research we do about our ancestors will luckily pass to one of our descendants or perhaps to a library or university. But what about our own story? In our age of electronic devices and the Internet, who knows what technology will look like 50 years from now- 100 years from now? How will our descendants know our story? We must capture our story now, so our descendants have no regrets about not asking us the questions we neglected to ask those that came before us.
One of my genealogy friends recently told me about a company called StoryKeeper. There are several companies today that provide similar services to help you compose your life story. StoryKeeper is intriguing and unique in that it sends you an email each week with a specific question to answer about a particular episode or event. This makes “putting pen to paper” easy. You can even use AI capabilities to help you with your writing. As you go through the process, memories will come flooding back to you. After you’ve completed your story, an ebook and hard cover book are published for you to pass along to your loved ones. I’m going to try this myself. I’ll let you know my progress as I go along. Since I have no children, my nieces, nephews, great nieces, great nephews, and so on down the line as they have families well after I’m gone will get to know about their great Aunt Katie’s life.
Katie Gertz FHSA President