## 06 What memories for our grandchildren ?

I remembered the stories my grandfather used to tell me when I was a little boy. They were about his childhood, of course, but also about the war, the Second World War. My dad also lived through a couple of years of the Second World War and told me about it. And then there was conscription... in Germany. I have been also conscripted much later, one of the last young French people to do so. But apart from that, what could I tell children about my life? The fall of the Eastern Bloc, the Berlin Wall? Yes, it was so interesting, but now it seems so far away. The beginning of personal computers, the Internet? I wrote about it on the French blog. It was fun, but when I see what we have made of it...
    
Memory and transmission are important to human beings. Some cultures have an oral tradition. Western cultures have had more of a written tradition for centuries. And now it's more of a multimedia tradition with audio and video. I have lost pictures of my grandfather and I keep many pictures of me, my wife, our souvenirs, our travels, some good moments, some people we met, etc... For what? I really don't know, because I don't think it will be useful for anyone... now. But tomorrow? For those who want to know more about the past, as very human beings, one day it can be useful to keep a trace, some elements of how life was, how we lived great events of history, and not only wars... There are books and films. There will be other media for this, with all the human memory that is recorded, stored, shared... But what about something more personal, like the stories of our direct ancestors? Don't count on DVDs or cloud services.

I do genealogy because I love the research and the history around it, with a capital H. It's like learning the big story with the sum of the little stories. The national archives and services that keep civil status and documents are helpful, and with digitization it's so easy to find documents and read them at home, now. I have found many documents from the 17th century or even earlier in Latin, German, old French, etc... There was some information about the work my ancestors did. Sometimes it's a vanished profession, a remnant of a past agriculture or a means of transport that no longer exists. My imagination does the rest with old pictures, films or books. I cannot be a fortune-teller to know how my descendants will learn about what we did, what it meant for the world they know. The way we pass on our memories is always different from the reality we lived. Our memories are transformed and embellished over the years. When I talk to my wife about my schooldays, it's hard to describe how different they were f
rom her own. The towns were so different and I found some old pictures on the internet to show her, just as she found pictures to show me. No films for my towns, whereas her high school has been filmed in some films. 

How to keep all those details alive. It seems insignificant for the great Human History but it's just what I wanted to hear form my grandparents and parents when I was a child. I could compare to my own life of child : the games, the shops, the books and films, the friends, the sports...It was like my own oral tradition and I have drawn some episodes many years later, written on my other blog, sometimes. We need to keep that link to the past to know who we are. For my wife, who's father and mother came from another country, it's different. She had to see by herself this country, even if it's so different with 50 years later, a war, … She had to feel where her roots were, and to paste together the remnants of his family history. I have also felt that when my father has brought me where he was living during WWII as a child. It's a strange feeling and sometimes I have a need to connect with my own past, my best memories. 

Well, I don't know how to communicate that. With blogs and archives to the people I know... Or lost in the amount of data we produce every day on this earth. I'm a grain of sand among billions of grains, and for each grain, particles of a life, quarks of moments and memories. Maybe I'm thinking about this because of a certain year for me, because I don't feel unbreakable anymore, because this earth doesn't seem immortal, because life in general seems so fragile with the madness of man. If I just think about my condition as an animal, about epigenetics, maybe I don't have to worry about that so much.

2Dɛ

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