Bob Brody, a consultant and essayist, is author of the memoir “Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age.”
In May, I visited an Italian high school to encourage a classroom of students to explore their family histories. My audience was almost all teenage boys. Some slouched, fidgeted and talked among themselves during my presentation. A few scoffed, altogether justifiably, at my hapless Italian.
I’ve long taken an interest in family history, beginning with my own. I have interviewed my mother about her life growing up profoundly deaf, and my maternal grandmother about raising a deaf child during the Depression. I once asked my father’s mother about her lineage only to discover, after she died, that she left me an hour-long audiotape containing some answers.
Even so, I regret leaving many questions unasked, and I know many others feel the same. This preoccupation ultimately led to creating a blog called “Letters to My Kids,” urging parents to invest in their past and preserve family history as a legacy for future generations.
But lately I’ve wondered: What if the protocol were reversed? What if the children, rather than the parents, were the amateur historians?
Four years ago I migrated to Guardia Sanframondi, an ancient hillside town of 4,900 people in southern Italy. Farmers here have worked the countryside for centuries, chiefly in vineyards and olive groves. It’s a place of rich history and deep family roots. If any place were to know its own history, surely this would be it.
I tested that idea at the high school around the corner from my home, where I instructed the students to ask their elders certain questions: How was your childhood? Why did you get married? What have you tried to teach your children? The broader and more open-ended the question, I suggested, the more revealing the answer.
Two weeks later, they turned in the essays I had assigned. Some, invited to do so, read the reports aloud, in faltering English with an Italian accent. The stories that emerged brought together the everyday and the expected with the surprising and the revelatory.
“My parents started dating after they had an argument during rehearsal for a play,” one student wrote. “When my father apologized to her, my mother forgave him, and they went out to eat for the first time in Naples.”
“My mother met my father when she was young,” wrote another, “since her father had a flock, and her future husband was there to shear the sheep, they started hanging out.”
“My grandparents got married because my grandmother was pregnant with my mother’s sister,” a student read aloud. “Back then, if you had children, you had to get married.”
“My grandmother passed away at 36 years old, a few hours after giving birth to my mother,” wrote another. “So my grandfather, Luciano, raised my mother and her brothers and sisters. Despite these difficulties, they never lacked for anything.”
Most of this information, I learned, was new to the students. A few of the boys came up to me after class to tell me how glad they were to have found it out. One said he now better understood and appreciated his parents and grandparents, especially the struggles they faced. Another said he was eager to discover more.
History is lost unless documented. That lesson applies to families as much as it does to politics, culture and war. If we neglect to capture our personal family history, we’ll never know what happened, much less how or why. And once we learn who our family was, we might also learn who we are.
If our children were ever tested on personal family history, many would probably fail. Some years back, I conducted an informal survey of 100 parents and grandparents about recording their family histories. Three out of four said they “should” do it. Four in 10 said they always planned to do it but never got around to it. Kids today could grow up to feel — and do — the same.
The holiday season is one of the few times of the year that multiple generations of many families come together to celebrate. As a resolution of the new year, what if the youngest of us, who have the most to learn, were invited to take on the role of family historian? All they would have to do to begin is go around the dinner table asking questions.
Who are your mother and father? Who are your grandparents? Only if children ask these questions are they likely to get complete answers. And once they know, they’ll know for a lifetime. Then, when the time comes, they’ll be ready to pass it along.
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