To borrow a popular song title from the Judds, “Grandpa, tell me about the good ‘ole days”, it has me contemplating, what would it have been like to sit with my grandfather just one more time, and get to ask him questions about his life? Sadly, I won’t have that opportunity. My maternal grandfather was the first dead person I ever saw. I was 6 years old when my mother took me to his funeral. Here laid the man who once chased me around the house with his false teeth he was holding. He taught me how to swing with full gusto at a piñata. He was a man covered in racy tattoos, evidence of his early days traveling the world as a member of the US Navy. This of course, was before he found religion. He was full of personality, and I’m sure, full of colorful stories.
JB Harvill was responsible for the name on my birth certificate getting changed twice before my parents left the hospital with me.
Ashley – sounded like a man’s name.
Lacey – hated it.
Kimberly? Approval was granted, and I became Kimberly.
I’m grateful to this man for making sure I got a great name, but I wish now, as an adult, I could have known this curious man and how he viewed the world, his world. I know his life was tough, which led to him lying about being 18, and joining the Navy before he was an adult.
My mother doesn’t have any recordings of him. All I have are still photos, and the memories of spending time with him before I turned 7.
Being the Family Storyteller is allowing me to create documentaries of grandparents to preserve them and their stories for future generations. Many great, great grand-children, will one day get what I don’t have, their ancestor’s stories being told by them, in their own words. They will get to know them through a documentary, even if they never knew them in this life.
Grandpa… tell me about the good ‘ole days. Sometimes it feels like this world’s gone crazy. Grandpa, take me back to yesterday, when the line between right and wrong didn’t seem so easy…
www.familystoryteller.com
mailto:[email protected]
JB Harvill was responsible for the name on my birth certificate getting changed twice before my parents left the hospital with me.
Ashley – sounded like a man’s name.
Lacey – hated it.
Kimberly? Approval was granted, and I became Kimberly.
I’m grateful to this man for making sure I got a great name, but I wish now, as an adult, I could have known this curious man and how he viewed the world, his world. I know his life was tough, which led to him lying about being 18, and joining the Navy before he was an adult.
My mother doesn’t have any recordings of him. All I have are still photos, and the memories of spending time with him before I turned 7.
Being the Family Storyteller is allowing me to create documentaries of grandparents to preserve them and their stories for future generations. Many great, great grand-children, will one day get what I don’t have, their ancestor’s stories being told by them, in their own words. They will get to know them through a documentary, even if they never knew them in this life.
Grandpa… tell me about the good ‘ole days. Sometimes it feels like this world’s gone crazy. Grandpa, take me back to yesterday, when the line between right and wrong didn’t seem so easy…
www.familystoryteller.com
mailto:[email protected]