July 17, 2015 By Guest Blogger
I learned about the importance of keeping a journal shortly after I joined the LDS church at the age of 16. I was the first in my family to join the church. About a year later my younger brother joined as well. My parents and 7 brothers and sisters chose not to join with my brother and me.
Throughout the first year as a new member of the Church, I heard several talks about how we should write down our life stories and document our experiences. My seminary teacher quoted a talk titled, Angles Will Quote from Our Journals by Spencer W. Kimball. He helped me understand that I will be forgotten by my posterity if I made no effort to preserve the . . .
I learned about the importance of keeping a journal shortly after I joined the LDS church at the age of 16. I was the first in my family to join the church. About a year later my younger brother joined as well. My parents and 7 brothers and sisters chose not to join with my brother and me.
Throughout the first year as a new member of the Church, I heard several talks about how we should write down our life stories and document our experiences. My seminary teacher quoted a talk titled, Angles Will Quote from Our Journals by Spencer W. Kimball. He helped me understand that I will be forgotten by my posterity if I made no effort to preserve the . . .
meaningful events of my life for future generations to read. I thought that was an interesting concept, but with school, a job, my responsibilities in the Church, and dating, I didn’t think I had time to keep a journal.
A year before I left on my mission, I started doing some family history work research on my own family lines. One of the first things I noticed was an almost complete lack of stories about any of my ancestors. I knew their names and the dates of important events in their lives but I didn’t know anything about who they were and what they were like.
It was at that time that I decided that I would be the first of my family to start keeping a daily journal. Over the many years of journal keeping I have recorded my feelings, questions I have about many things, events that were taking place in my life and in the world around me and my observations about what my spouse and my children were doing. In fact, I’ve documented those things so well that whenever there is a disagreement over what happened to whom or when something took place, we often go to my journals and look up what really happened. My journals have been a great source for settling disputes.
It was at that time that I decided that I would be the first of my family to start keeping a daily journal. Over the many years of journal keeping I have recorded my feelings, questions I have about many things, events that were taking place in my life and in the world around me and my observations about what my spouse and my children were doing. In fact, I’ve documented those things so well that whenever there is a disagreement over what happened to whom or when something took place, we often go to my journals and look up what really happened. My journals have been a great source for settling disputes.
To date, I’ve created 42 journals, including 2 missionary journals in which only 2 days of my mission were not documented because of sickness.
Preserving the stories of my own life has proven so valuable that I have begun recording the oral histories of my aunts and uncles, my parents and my siblings and other relatives. These histories have helped create an amazingly detailed history of my immediate family as well as my extended family.
All of my journals have been digitized by the LDS Church History Department and are now stored in the Granite Mountain Records Vault. Now I know my posterity will never be without a history of their ancestors as I was. They will have their genealogies, photographs, health records, vital information and accounts of deeply spiritual events. They will be able to read stories about me, my wife, my children and many other family members.
I guess in this respect I am a pioneer in that I was the first of my line to pave the way in the creation and preservation my family’s stories. I am what Brian Reeves (an employee at the Church History Department) refers to as “a Rememberer,” one of those folks who notices the world around him or her and writes about those events. A Rememberer preserves the history of one’s family because they took the time to observe what was happening around them and recorded such things for the sake of our future posterity. It’s a nice feeling to be known as a Rememberer.
Preserving the stories of my own life has proven so valuable that I have begun recording the oral histories of my aunts and uncles, my parents and my siblings and other relatives. These histories have helped create an amazingly detailed history of my immediate family as well as my extended family.
All of my journals have been digitized by the LDS Church History Department and are now stored in the Granite Mountain Records Vault. Now I know my posterity will never be without a history of their ancestors as I was. They will have their genealogies, photographs, health records, vital information and accounts of deeply spiritual events. They will be able to read stories about me, my wife, my children and many other family members.
I guess in this respect I am a pioneer in that I was the first of my line to pave the way in the creation and preservation my family’s stories. I am what Brian Reeves (an employee at the Church History Department) refers to as “a Rememberer,” one of those folks who notices the world around him or her and writes about those events. A Rememberer preserves the history of one’s family because they took the time to observe what was happening around them and recorded such things for the sake of our future posterity. It’s a nice feeling to be known as a Rememberer.