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Forgotten People Consider this a call for everyone to observe and remember, and to record, in as much detail as possible, knowledge of their family members and friends, so the lives of forgotten people will be more than a single entry on a line on a census report... By Joyce M. Coomer Throughout the year I send out several dozen greeting cards. This past Christmas, I noticed that more than a few people were absent from my mailing list. Some were my family members, some were Greg's family members, and some were old friends. How well did I know these people? A few, very well. Others, fairly well. And others, when I stopped to think about it, just barely, even though I had known them as long as I could remember. As a child, like a lot of children, while I was around adults, I didn't always pay close attention to what they were talking about. (Or the adults changed the subject when I appeared.) There are things I remember them telling about, like driving Model T's or Model A's in deep snow. Other things, like their favorite foods or how they met their husband or wife, I don't remember if I ever heard anyone discussing those topics. There are people who have their lives chronicled in great detail. Most of them for no reason other than they had more money than someone else. A few because they did exceptional things - like the Wright brothers or Louis Pasteur. What concerns me are the forgotten people. People whose families didn't care about preserving family stories or dismissed older family members' stories of their lives as senile ramblings. People who didn't have large families where there was a lot of visiting and telling of their life's events. People without any children to whom family stories could be told and preserved. These people have contributed to society as well as the people whose biographies can be found in any library. They may not have discovered that smallpox can be prevented by vaccination, but they may have known of herbal treatments that are now lost in the mists of the past, possibly to be rediscovered centuries from now. These overlooked people are the bedrock of society. Without them, what human beings consider progress would not occur very quickly. They are the ones who toil, often unacknowledged and underpaid, to put into place that for which someone else receives credit and praise, fame and fortune. From time to time, some government entity decides it would be a great community project to record stories elderly people can tell about their lives. Sometimes the range of people chosen for these projects is wide, other times, just a few, chosen by the powers that be, are the only ones interviewed. However well-meaning these projects are, they are nowhere as inclusive nor informative as they could be. With the advent of smart-phones and their recording capabilities, there is no excuse for anyone's life story to be lost. (I am not discussing selfies and similar things - I am discussing in-depth chronicling.) These stories need to be recorded and stored in several places. Walk through a graveyard. Read the names on the tombstones. How many do you recognize who are not your family members? In small towns, only the ones who had money, whose stories are told over and over. Yet those tombstones are only a small portion of the tombstones in any particular graveyard and of the tombstones in other graveyards scattered across the land. Who are the other people interred? Did they laugh, love and linger on the back porch watching the sun go down? Did they prefer blackberry cobbler or pecan pie for dessert? Were they exceptional seamstresses or woodcarvers who were unknown outside their community? What color was their hair, their eyes? Did they like to dress up or was everyday clothing more to their liking? Let us remember these people, chronicle their lives, record what we know about them and what we can learn from them. At the very least, make sure the basics are preserved - when and where they were born, their parents and grandparents, where they went to school and how long they attended, where they lived, what they did for a living . . . If that much is recorded, future generations will be able to know something about these forgotten people. Consider this a call for everyone, from the time they are old enough to talk, to observe and remember, and to record, in as much detail as possible, knowledge of their family members and friends, so the lives of these forgotten people will be more than a single entry on a line on a census report. This story was posted on 2019-01-17 21:36:37
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