My notes from this evening:

Almost 55 years of journal keeping.

Show first Journal: Small white one.  Read excerpts.

What are your family’s most treasured possessions?

Show Elsa’s 1912 journal crossing the ocean from Germany.

Years ago I spent many hours in BYU Special Collections pouring over old journals and histories trying to reconstruct the lives of my family members (many of whom did not keep journals).

Nothing strengthens my testimony of Journaling more than when I discover and  read the journals or personal histories of family members who are gone, or of others who were kind enough to mention my family members in their journals.

How many of you have access to the journals of your parents, grandparents, or

ancestors?  If not, what would you give to know more about the details of their lives?  What do you wish you knew about them?

How many of you are writing now things your posterity will treasure?

What motivates you to write?

What makes it hard for you to write?

If we had time, I’d share some accounts written by my ancestors and have you listen for:

1.  What you find interesting and why

2.  What things are different from what you experience in today’s world?

3.  Context

4.  Details

5.  How does what you hear affect you?

Sometimes I read things in the journals of others that change me and how much I love my ancestors.  A man named Joseph Lee Robinson who also lived close to Joseph Smith and my GGG Grandparents and to the river made such a journal entry one day, describing the living conditions in Nauvoo in those days.  I have never forgotten his words.

My great-great grandmother, Charlotte was a little girl in Nauvoo at the time he wrote this journal entry.  I often think of her curled up in her bed at night and wonder.

Here’s what Joseph Lee Robinson wrote in August 1841:

Long-tailed rat

Joseph Lee Robinson Journal:

“When we arrived in the city of Nauvoo, I soon found my brother Ebenezer. He had a house for us to go to. It was a big log house near his printing office. Ebenezer was the printer for the church. (He was writing the Church Organ,) so had built a large two-story house. The top floor was used for his home and the bottom for the printing press. It was near the river, not far from the Prophet Joseph’s home. The worst enemy we found here was the long-tailed rat, that would bite the lips and nose[s] of our little children while they slept.” (Page 6)

That one sentence someone else wrote in their journal helps me love my ancestors more.  They did hard things for me.  I love them because I know what they did.  And because I know them, I feel them close to me now.

————

Ancestors who left journals or photos or stories are the easiest to get to know.  Journals help us know what they did and why.  They help us understand the challenges they dealt with.  People who left journals speak to us even after they are gone.

We are able to connect with them when we know something about them.

We can relate our lives to theirs.

We can see how choices they made played out in their lives.

(At the time great-grandma wrote about meeting great-grandpa, she didn’t know she’d end up marrying him!)

We can see from our perspective what they couldn’t see from theirs.

They wrote day by day or year by year, not knowing what their future would bring.  But WE can look back and see their whole lives and how things played out.  We can see how keeping the commandments blessed lives and how wrong choices caused trouble and sadness.  We can learn from their choices.

I think that’s one of the most important reasons why HF wants us to Write!

We often talk about the Spirit of Elijah in relation to Family History work.  When I do FH work, I feel my heart turning to my fathers and ancestors and I feel that they are aware of me when I notice them.

If I don’t pay attention them, they don’t pay attention to me.

I often sense the presence or influence of those loved ones who have gone before.

In most cases, I never knew them here, but have learned to love them since.

Some I feel especially close to and I feel them particularly near.

One day it occurred to me that it’s when I’m paying attention to them that I feel them paying attention to me.  It’s like they’re given permission to be near me. Perhaps because I love and care for them, they get to return love and care for me in a way I can feel it.  I feel them watching out for me and protecting me and my family.

That never happens with the ancestors I don’t know.

MAYBE if we write in our journals today, our future descendants will get to know us and love US and maybe long after we are gone, they will get to feel Us near them!

That’s one of the biggest reasons why I write in my journal.  I want my children who will never know me on earth to know me and to know why I lived the way I lived.

I want them to know why I went to girls camp,

why I read my scriptures,

why I try to be good, and

why I went on a mission.

I want them to know how much I love my Savior Jesus Christ.

I want them to know ME.

And if they know ME, maybe I will get to hover near THEM!

In that day, maybe they will feel ME because they have my words and they know me!  In that day, I hope I can watch over and protect THEM!

———–

Journals also help us REMEMBER things that happened in our lives.  Here’s a journal entry Claire wrote on 19 Oct 2002:

“Today we had Haley’s cat Cinamon’s funeral.  We think he got hit by a car last night.  We burried him in the Powell’s yard.  We put a peice of cement over the place we burried him in.  A lot of people brought flowers to the tombstone.  We sang “I am a cat of God.”  A lot of people were crying durring the song.  Haley and I shared our thoughts and feelings about Cinamon.”

Nothing has improved my journaling skills more than some ideas I want to teach you today from Arthur Henry King.  (Show book) Read Handout:

Arthur Henry King on Journal Writing and Personal Histories

From The Abundant Life, Bookcraft, 1986, pp.231-236.

The important thing to remember when writing a personal history or keeping a journal is that our descendants will be interested in the kinds of things that most interest us in the personal histories or journals of others.  What kinds of things are these?  First of all, the details of everyday life–details like our kitchen procedures and the way we treat our young children–because these things change so very much over the years.  We are writing for posterity, and that posterity may extend for hundreds of years, and we can be sure that in one or two hundred years’ time those details will be very different indeed.  Our descendants will also be interested in the fundamental things–the truly fundamental things–birth, death, and marriage.  So we also need to leave them true accounts of the most important things that happen to us.

Our descendants will want to know what seems old and ridiculous to us, what seems new and interesting, what surprises us, what distresses us, what bores us, but above all, what interests us.  They will want to know about our reactions to events, people, situations.

Our descendants will be interested in our genuine reactions, opinions, and feelings, not our conventional ones. . . When we write we need to be ourselves.  We should not be misled by any teaching or cultural message we have received about being artificially cheerful or artificially anything.  And we should not dismiss unpleasant matters from our minds.  They must be faced, and our own responsibility for them must be assessed.  Our responsibility is to tell the truth.  We may need to reflect on how to put it down, but we should never reflect on how it will strike others, including our descendants.  It is not for us to judge what we think will be good for them to read and what we think will not be good for them to read.  The ways of salvation are not the ways of persuasion, but the ways of conviction.  If we try to be truthful (and this is one of the few things we should try to be), then we are likely to convince.  If we try to convince, we are less likely to be truthful.  It is for us to set down the truth as we know it and think it; and for our descendants, not for us, to judge.  Humility and honesty are two names for the same thing in writing.  Try, therefore, humbly and honestly to assess your experience.  Don’t try to make your experiences into more or less than they were, and above all, don’t think of your audience and try to appeal to them.

We need to keep in mind in writing, the style in which Joseph Smith presented his own experiences.  His manner is matter-of-fact and cool.  He doesn’t try to persuade us or work up out feelings.  He may make us feel as a result of what he tells us, but he doesn’t make an effort to make us feel.  He does not attempt to do other than describe what happened, including how he felt.  There is an important difference between expressing one’s feelings and describing one’s feelings.  When we attempt to express our feelings, we nearly always find ourselves, instead, expressing the feelings we ought to have had or should like to have had or exaggerating the feelings that we really did have.  The attempt is enough to cancel out our chance of success.  But if we try simply to describe our feelings we don’t fall into these errors.

Abstract statements about our feelings are boring and don’t really communicate.  But a plain account may communicate a great deal.  If we write down faithfully what happens to us, our feelings will come through, and they will be felt indirectly and therefore truly.  So rather than say how we felt on our marriage day, we should try to describe what happened to us on that marriage day.  Our feelings will come through much better than if we just say how we felt.  We are more likely to be able to convey to our descendants something of what we really were if we try to set down the truth about what happens to us, and the more concrete and more detailed it is the better, and the less abstract it is the better.  It is a mark of genius to single out the little details that make everything come alive; and very often that happens, not because one seeks to do it, but because one is in the right frame of mind and has taken one’s experience in the right way.  Notice in the Joseph Smith story details like his leaning up against the mantlepiece when he gets home and the humorous remark he makes to his mother on that occasion.

. . . . A personal history always needs to be revised, because what we think is most important in our lives changes as our lives go on.  Certain experiences become less important, more profound.  Were we here simply to have certain experiences , life would soon be over for us.  But we are here to live so that those experiences–for example the experience of temple marriage–may broaden and deepen and become richer as we grow older.  Though we may think we understand the significance of eternal marriage, at the time we are married, we may understand it much more deeply later.  In fact, we may spend a lifetime realizing or beginning to realize what the real significance of an eternal marriage is.  So just as we should go back constantly to the scriptures and to other great books, we should go back to the most important experiences of our lives. . . . The greatest experiences of our lives need to be remembered and cultivated and thought of day after day.  We don’t want to tuck them underground.  They are there for us to keep, treasure, observe, know and live with. . . . The most important experiences of our lives shape our lives–they are our lives.

How does what he suggest differ from how most people write?

More honest Not “feelings” (gratitude journals often miss the mark)

What were the things he said would be most interesting to generations to come?

The things that interest you will interest your children some day.

– It interests my 15 year old son that personal computers did not exist when I graduated from HS and that by the time I was his age I had seen fewer than 10 theater  movies in my entire LIFE.  Videos would not be invented until I was on my mission.

– It interests my 13 year old daughter that blow dryers, curling irons, and flat irons did not exist when I was 13.  She finds it strange that at her age I sewed most of my clothes and rode a school bus to school .

– My 11 year old son, who wants to be an inventor, finds it interesting that nothing in Circuit City today existed when I was his age.  Not one thing.  We played music on records and were leery of 8-track tapes when they came out.  Tape recorders and cassettes, Videos and CDs, cell phones and ipods were all a thing of the future.

My mom kept a journal and  wrote quite a bit.  She handed me a copy of a  30-40 page personal history before she died.  She wanted me to read it.  The only time I was mentioned was when I was born.  I felt sad about that.

Tell about excerpts from Eliza R. Snow, John Taylor, JS, who mentioned us.

One of the things I’ve learned that is important in journal writing is to mention lots of people–all those who surround you.  If you want your kids to someday take an interest in what you have to say, make it interesting to them too–have something to say about their lives.

I’ve made it a practice to mention in every daily entry what the kids are doing or saying.

Copy notes from texts or messages family members send.  Include actual dialogue.

Adam to Nauvoo last week: Saints.  “What the heck is that??”

3 yr old Hazel Lassen: “They said it was OK to pee in the pool.”

John yesterday after babysitting Caleb while I had a meeting, “I’m so grateful you chose to stay home with the kids and do this all day, every day!”  (It’s hard.)

Mention what’s going on in the neighborhood or on the news.

Note signs of the times.  (Victor Ludlow Isaiah class 40 years ago.)

Your words and experience and comments are of little use to your family members if they are not interesting to them.

So, how can we make our journals more fun and interesting?

Be an interesting person.

If you’re not an interesting person, there are other things you can do to make your journals interesting.

Dialogue, Details, Descriptions, Day in the Life of, Dreams

Handout: List of things I like to do in my journals/why use a computer

Handout: Things I will really wish I’d recorded when I’m older

Record “A Day in the Life of”

A total description of yourself every 5 years

Create a Chronology

Write a Yearly summary every year before the year ends –Wilford Woodruff

Start a Writing Group with friends

Meet together in person or online, share something you’ve written

Ease in with LISTS

Lists–52 Lists of Happiness, List books, find lists online

Use Writing Prompts  –To our Children’s Children, Old Friend From Far Away

The Book of Alchemy 100 Day Project

Show examples of helpful books: Encyclopedia of an Everyday Life, List books, writing prompt books, ideas for kids, etc.

Commit to writing for 8 minutes a day.