Adding color to your family history
There are many ways you can fill in the story of your family. When you have exhausted all the family lore, letters, clippings, etc. sometimes there is just no story behind the bare facts of an ancestor.
Family Searcher
By Nina Brawn 
My family suffered many moves and a few fires, so there are not many photos, etc. available from my early years. This is when we need to remember that “no man is an island.” Your ancestor did not exist in a vacuum, life and history were going on around them, and they must have been aware of it. For example, I was a teenager when our soldiers were drafted to go to Vietnam. No one in my immediate family and none of my friends were drafted. However, I could not ignore the news reports of the time, and I was old enough to watch the televised selection of draft numbers with apprehension for older friends.
A check of old yearbooks would include photos of course, but it is also a good source for clues to interests that siblings may have missed or forgotten. Mine would reveal interests in drama, politics, and I don’t remember what else. Use these hints when producing your scrapbook or whatever medium you choose to produce your family story. Without knowing me, these clues would allow you to add theater masks to decorate my story. It should also spur you to consider what ways I might have put those interests into my life as an adult. I became a DJ at the local radio station. I was involved in local amateur theater. I was involved in several civic activities and ran for office on the school board. Old issues of the Observer would mention some of these and other activities in which I have been involved.
I first voted in the Nixon/Bill Cohen era of politics, and am still voting through the Obama/LePage years. While not appropriate for everyone, since I was involved in politics in my yearbook, it would be reasonable to include political symbols, as well as something to do with, at least the first election in which I would have been able to vote.
I was born in Auburn, California, and although we left before I could have created any memories, it would still be good to use the Internet to find photos (not under copyright) of Auburn. My family lived in the small towns of Sangerville and Dover-Foxcroft when I was growing up. Small town life is all about the neighborhood, so it is more than appropriate to put in photos of the streets that I would have walked, the stores I would have patronized, the schools I attended.
Your job in putting your ancestor’s story together is to interpret what you have learned about them from your research, and what you have found that was important in their historical time period (Three Mile Island/Love Canal?)
None of the items I have suggested are personal, but any reader viewing your book will have an idea of the influences that helped to shape who your ancestor was in their own life and time.
Editor’s note: This regular column is sponsored by the Aroostook County Genealogical Society. The group meets the fourth Monday of the month except in July and December at the Cary Medical Center’s Chan Education Center, 163 Van Buren Road, Caribou, at 6:30 p.m. Guests and prospective members are always welcome. FMI contact Edwin “J” Bullard at 492-5501. Columnist Nina Brawn of Dover-Foxcroft, who has been doing genealogy for over 30 years, is a freelance genealogy researcher, speaker and teacher. Reader e-mails are welcome at ninabrawn@gmail.com.
