Generations

Today is my grandfather’s 83^rd birthday. The other day, I was looking for another picture when I came across this old picture of my first Christmas in December 1980. It’s of me and Grandpa. At the time, I’m the only grandchild. I was 10 months old and Grandpa would be 47 years old.  It was a long time ago:

The funny thing is the picture below. It is Emry’s first Christmas. Although not the first grandchild, she is the first granddaughter. She is 8 months old and my dad would be 61 years old:

I can hear my mother now, “That’s scary.”

Yeah…it is a little.

We live in a day and age when we capture almost everything on camera. Mostly because we have them on our cell phones which are in our pockets. Emry is only 15 months old, but she already knows she can look at my phone or Ed’s phone and find a myriad of pictures of herself. Enough pictures to fill my first photo album which runs from the time I was born until I was five. More pictures than Ed has of his entire life put together. She lives in a very different world.

But her grandparents have even less pictures…her great-grandparents less than that…and I might have one or two pictures of each of her great-great grandparents. While my family might have some photographs of the generation previous to that, that’s about as far back as it goes – and none of those pictures are of Great Great Grandfather William as a baby. All of I know of them are snippets of stories passed down, names and dates in a genealogy. You don’t have to go back far to loose who these people are.

It would be nice to say that Emry’s great-great grandkids will have a myriad of pictures of her, but the world this present generation captures on their phones is a fleeting as the world when cameras didn’t exist. Those moments will be lost in cyberspace somewhere. Many of them already are. No one will remember. And Emry will be a name and date in someone’s genealogy.

I love history. I love looking over the names and dates of my genealogy and wondering whom those people were. Sometimes I wish at least one of them had been someone really important whose letters and writings were preserved for generations – someone you could actually know. Those thoughts remind me yet again that I should write things down. I should write down the stories I’ve heard of my ancestors (no matter how distorted they might have become in the passing of them, there is some truth to them). Perhaps then future generations will have more than names and dates to look at – unless they decide Grandma Melissa’s ramblings take up too much byte space and need to be deleted. But I suppose that’s the risk every generation takes, attempting to pass on something worthwhile to the future…a risk I think would be worth taking.