Family histories are very important and necessary documents  to preserve our individual backgrounds and allow the knowledge of the past to be carried into the future.  I believe it behooves all of us to share in this burden.   It doesn't have to be a mammoth effort, just a little bit at a time.  Write a biography of some relative, with or without their help.  Be sure and include some pictures with it.   Remember that this is something that is always put off until it is too late.  Do it now.

The creation of our family history book was, in my mind, a fluke.  It's not fair to call it a fluke.  It all started when my cousin, Robert Van Wechel, put all the family documents and ancestral pictures that he had at his disposal, on to a computer disk (CD) primarily to preserve the pictures and, of course, make them available to everyone.  He offered me a copy and being the photography nut that I am, I told him to send me one.  I wanted to see what he had put together.

Upon receipt of the disk and seeing what was on it, I immediately went to our storage room and started to rummage through all the boxes we had, searching for pictures that Robert didn't have on the disk.  I found several and also found some documents that his mother had written in the 1950's.  These documents were the biographies of her brothers, sisters, parents, and grandparents.  Needless to say, I immediately sent the documents to Robert for his inspection and review.  To his amazement and mine, he hadn't ever seen the write-ups.

His response was to put these documents on a disk and essentially create a family history of our grandparents and their descendants.  As we dug and probed other relatives, more pictures surfaced to use in this family history book. 

We worked on the chapters, sending disks back and forth from California to Minnesota and Minnesota to California.  It wasn't long before we had a book formulated which contained pictures that coincided with the words written by Robert's mother.  And then we kept digging for more information, hoping to completely cover all of Jens Leum's children and of course their children.   All the information we found was put together and called the Leum Family History.

That went so well that my brother said, "Since you are now the expert, it's time to do our mother's side of the family."  That shove was enough.  I pursued locating as many cousins as I could find and collected all the pictures they had and assembled a Family History detailing my mother's family, the Findahls.  This gave me a great sense of accomplishment.   If my brother hadn't spurred me on, all of the history of this family would have been lost to the ages.

It behooves all of us to document or record in some fashion what we know of our ancestry and the world around us.  Take it from me, time flies, as the saying goes, and pretty soon you are of an age when you can't remember which end is up.

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