Family Time Capsule.: Tools to Bring Your Family Tree to Life & Leave A Lasting Legacy Copyright Š 2011 Susan Gabriel. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. ISBN: 978-0-9835882-0-7
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To my ancestors and descendants
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Table of Contents Part One: The Big Picture Introduction..................................................................................................6 What is a Family Time Capsule?.................................................................6 My Background...........................................................................................7 The Mission.................................................................................................8 Calling All Historians and Storytellers......................................................10 What to Expect...........................................................................................11 An Introduction to Genograms...................................................................11 The Power of Family..................................................................................12 Bringing Your Family Into Clearer Focus.................................................14 A Family Reunion Analogy.......................................................................14 An Incredibly Short History of Genograms...............................................17 What is a Genogram? An Overview..........................................................17 A Doable Timeline.....................................................................................19 Family Resilience: A Story........................................................................19 Relationship Patterns in a Family..............................................................20 Significant Life Events in a Family...........................................................21 Invisible Patterns and the Ham Story.........................................................21 Key Concepts of a Genogram....................................................................23 The Dance..................................................................................................24 The Whole World’s A Stage (as is our Family)........................................25 Birth Order, Beliefs and Boundaries.........................................................27 Stress, Marital Relationships and Triangles..............................................30 Reactions to Hard Times, Gender Beliefs and Patterns of Illness.............31 Family Roles and Family Secrets..............................................................33 A Quick Recap..........................................................................................34 Common Genogram Symbols...................................................................37 A Confession.............................................................................................41 4|Family Time Capsule
Princess Diana’s Genogram.......................................................................42 Oprah Winfrey’s Genogram......................................................................47 Your Treasure Map Awaits........................................................................51
Part Two: Practical How-To Getting Started...........................................................................................51 A Quick Refresher Course.........................................................................52 It Takes a Village.......................................................................................53 Supplies and Logistics...............................................................................53 Information-gathering Worksheet.............................................................54 Other Sources for Searching Out Information...........................................55 Interviewing Family Members..................................................................56 Getting It Down On Paper.........................................................................57 Diving Deeper Into the Key Concepts.......................................................60 Common Family Roles..............................................................................63 An In-depth Look at Birth Order...............................................................64 Characteristics of First-Born Children.......................................................65 Famous First-Born Children......................................................................66 Characteristics of Middle Children........................................................... 66 Famous Middle Children...........................................................................66 Characteristics of Last Born or Youngest Children...................................67 Famous Last Born or Youngest Children..................................................67 Characteristics of Only Children...............................................................67 Famous Only Children...............................................................................68 A Closer Look at Family Beliefs and Values............................................68 Does Gender Matter?.................................................................................69 Don’t Fence Me In: A Closer Look at Boundaries....................................70 Your Family’s Unspoken Mottos...............................................................71 Common Family Themes...........................................................................71 Grief and Other Losses..............................................................................72 Family Resilience......................................................................................74 5|Family Time Capsule
Your Parent’s Relationship—Why It Might Matter..................................75 Triangles Revisited....................................................................................76 The Hand We’re Dealt...............................................................................79 Common Patterns of Illness.......................................................................79 More Skeletons In The Closet?..................................................................80 Common Family Secrets............................................................................81 Benefits of Creating an Enhanced Genealogy............................................81 For Fun: A Genogram of the Wizard of Oz Story.....................................82 Wrapping Up and Moving On...................................................................85
Part Three – Digging Deeper for Buried Treasure Telling the Family Story Through Chronology.........................................88 The Smith Family Chronology..................................................................88 Chronology / Timeline – Princess Diana...................................................89 Family Stories Reveal Who We Are..........................................................91 Family Stories and Family Themes...........................................................92 Getting the Most Out of Your Family Stories: 8 Questions......................93 The Absence of Family Stories..................................................................94 20 Advanced Questions.............................................................................95 Dear Descendant Letters: The Old Fashioned Art of Letter Writing........96 Sample of the Dear Descendant Letter......................................................99 A Life Review That Everyone Needs to Do..............................................99 Life Review: Questions and Reflections..................................................101 Do You Have a Book In You? Writing Memoirs....................................103 Possible Additions to your Family Time Capsule...................................105 A Fond Farewell......................................................................................106 Handwritten Genogram Example............................................................107 Bibliography............................................................................................108 Contact Information.................................................................................109
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Part One: The Big Picture
Introduction Everyone wants to be remembered. Everyone wants to leave some kind of legacy behind. We want to know that our lives have mattered. We want to know that we won’t be forgotten. Perhaps that’s one reason why our fascination with tracing our family trees has never been greater. We yearn to know where we come from and where we belong. At a time when people seem more dislocated than ever, our family tree shows us an important part of our place in the flow of history.
What is a Family Time Capsule? A Family Time Capsule is a collection of insightful documents about you and your family designed to help you to leave behind a legacy that enriches those who follow. The tools presented in this book include ways to collect, record, organize and preserve family history and family stories so they are not lost and forgotten. It includes ways to generate powerful letters to future generations that will help your descendants feel as if they know you. It offers insight and instruction on how to use powerful, little-known techniques to identify the impacts of birth order, family roles, family strengths and even family secrets. This book also contains detailed instruction on how to create a new and exciting family history document called a genogram—a graphic, psychological map that brings your family tree to life—that until now has only been used by family counselors, social workers and doctors. This book also contains significant resources to help you or older family members complete a life review so that future generations can benefit from the things you or your older family members have learned. It shows ways to discover and document a family chronology and offers advice on how to go about creating a memoir, if that’s something you are considering. In other words, this book introduces you to the Family Time Capsule—the ultimate family scrapbook.
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Traditionally, time capsules are buried and opened after fifty or a hundred years. But what I’m suggesting in this book isn’t a traditional time capsule where a wide range of items are collected by a wide variety of people to represent a specific time in history. This time capsule highlights a specific family. It collects information about the life of this particular family that can be left behind as a powerful legacy to the family members that follow. It represents the next level of genealogy research that is more than names and dates. It is a collection of memories that adds another dimension to your family history. A history where your family tree is enhanced and brought to life with family personalities and family stories. With such a meaningful collection, instead of burying your Family Time Capsule, you may want to keep your family history treasures above ground in a dry, safe place that’s easier to get to. Over the years I’ve heard from clients and customers that they’ve kept their Family Time Capsules in a variety of places including lock boxes, safes, accordion folders, file cabinet drawers, plastic storage bins, as well as all manner of special containers, such as ones made of decorative carved wood, steamer trunks, and vintage suitcases. You can also put your findings on a website or blog. My Background Before we get into the material, I’d like to take a moment to tell you a little bit about myself and why I wanted to write this book. For many years, I was a successful marriage and family therapist in private practice. One of the tools I’ll be introducing to you in this book is something that I used almost daily in my work. In fact, this tool—called the genogram—was one of my favorite parts of counseling individuals and families because it gave me a tremendous amount of information about a person and their family in a short amount of time, usually in just one or two sessions. Not to mention that this document was something that I could refer to again and again. My clients seemed to get a lot out of them, too. They found that their genogram gave them ‘aha’s about the patterns passing down through the generations in their families. It gave them insight into how they had become the people they had become. With greater insight, comes greater wisdom and the ability to choose something different if we want to. Without insight, our history often becomes our destiny. During my active years as a therapist, I kept wondering how I could expand this wonderful assessment tool into something that could be used and appreciated by laypeople in order to understand and document their family dynamics and enhance their family trees. I began to figure out how the genogram could be used to expand beyond the problem areas in families to reveal the strengths and resiliencies in a family. I also began to see how this system could benefit anyone interested in expanding their genealogical history to include how a family relates, as well as identifying the different characters and personalities of family members so that the essence of who they are and were can be remembered. 8|Family Time Capsule
Besides wanting to share genograms with more people, another reason I wrote this book is that I am a lover of stories, especially family stories. I love to listen to people tell their family stories because they are often rich with information about how a family and individuals within a family view life. I also read a lot of fiction, narrative nonfiction and memoirs, as well as, write novels. Over the years I’ve become more and more concerned that with our busy lives and technological overloads, we may be losing our stories. Earlier in our history, families kept track of their legacy through family stories. Family legends and folklore were passed down the generations around the family hearth. Storytelling was the tradition. Stories were how we got to know our ancestors. Their stories lived on. It was an oral tradition and the way we passed along our family history. Later in our human evolution, we also began to document our family births, deaths and marriages, in family Bibles, and other records began to be kept. Today both professional and armchair genealogists prepare detailed and complicated family trees, rich with names and dates. Yet these family trees can be a bit skeletal and leave us wanting more. I happen to believe that true gold is found in fleshing them out with family stories and the details of family relationships. My family of origin was a hard-working middle class family from Irish/English origins. Both my parents worked. They didn’t have time to sit around telling me and my brother old family stories. Nor did I think to ask. More and more, television, movies and the internet are taking the place of us sitting around the hearth and telling our stories. The good news is that more and more people are getting into their family history. It’s not too late to record and document the things that we want our descendants to know about us and the family we grew up in. The Mission Those stern-looking people in the photograph are my great-grandparents. To be honest, they are the main reason I wrote this book. This photograph has accompanied me to every home I’ve ever lived in. Today, it sits in a lovely frame in my office and during the writing of this book it sat on my desk as I wrote the words that you’re reading now. Why would these two stoic ancestors of mine be such an inspiration for this book? Because I don’t know anything about them.
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From the inscription on the back, I know that the photo was taken in 1918. I also know that their names were Washington Williams—or “Wash” as he was apparently called—and Martha Williams. For years the only clues I had about these people were what I could observe in the photo, which wasn’t a lot. This is the only photograph that exists of them. I imagine it was taken by a traveling photographer who had ventured into the southern Appalachian Mountains to perhaps earn a few cents per photograph. It wasn’t until many years later, after doing some basic genealogical research, I found out where they were living every ten years that the census came around and the dates when they were born and died. I know they had four children, one of whom was my grandmother. But even with these details, I really don’t know who these people were in a deeper, fuller way. What were they like? What kind of marriage did they have? Was it loving and close, formal, conflicted? My great grandfather has a ribbon on his lapel. What was it for? My great-grandmother looks so stern in the photo, but what made her laugh? What made her cry? What were their days like? What were their strengths? How about their weaknesses? What kind of parents were they? How did they show anger? How did they show love? What did they feel passionate about? Unfortunately, these two people have for the most part been forgotten. Their lives had value. They deserved to be remembered. Yet, there were no diaries left behind. No newspaper clippings. No photographs besides this one. And my grandmother rarely talked about her childhood and her parents. In all honestly, my great-grandparents and grandparents were probably too busy on their farms to think in terms of leaving a lasting legacy. Yet I am their legacy. I know that part of them is inside of me in invisible ways every day of my life. Do you remember your grandparents? What was their relationship like? What kinds of things did they feel passionate about? What made them laugh? What made them cry? You may have had an up-close and personal look at their relationship. You may have spent time with them. If I asked you to describe them in a few words you could probably do it. In doing so, it might even bring a smile to your face or a hint of recognition. These are the kinds of memories that we want to preserve. You are an expert on your family, whether you realize it or not. If you remember your grandparents, it is important that you document the kind of people they were and the things that you remember about their lives. That said, my mission in this book is to encourage you to leave information behind in the form of an enhanced family tree—a genogram and other materials to create a Family Time Capsule—so that your great-granddaughter or great grand-niece, or someone else in your family, isn’t carrying around a photograph of you a hundred years from now, yearning to know who you were, but finding no answers.
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Calling All Historians and Storytellers This book is for the historians and storytellers in your family. Those people who go in search of a good mystery and who want to document their findings. It’s for someone who doesn’t just want to know what time it is, they want to know what makes the clock tick. They are curious about inner workings. They are curious about what makes their families work and they want to learn from that and also be able to pass down this information as part of their legacy. Tristine Rainer, author of a book called, Your Life as Story, says, “As a bird must sing, it’s your human nature to tell your story.” And I’d add that it’s human nature to want to know where we come from and who our family is. We all want to have a sense of where we belong. In one way or another, many of us are in search of our people, our clan. Have you ever thought about your family history as a really good story? It probably has everything you would need to write a really good book. It might have all the makings for a tantalizing novel or a dazzling memoir. Good stories have fascinating plots, a cast of well-developed characters, twists of fate and perhaps a dash of intrigue or mystery to them. Classic themes play out in each of our lives, involving tales of love, betrayal, triumph, not to mention tales of miraculous accomplishments, quests for greatness, and searches for contentment and peace. If you know where and how to look, you may discover that your family history is rich in tales of love and adventure. If you haven’t seen these themes play out in your life, perhaps they’ve played out in previous generations. Family stories can sometimes evolve into legend, like the stories that were told around the Thanksgiving table when you were a child or those stories told in front of the fireplace every Christmas or holiday season. You may be surprised to discover how much these family stories have shaped your life and the lives of others in your family. One of the ways that we will begin to unearth family stories is to complete a genogram and document your psychological family tree. This process has been described as putting a jigsaw puzzle together where you yourself are one of the puzzle pieces. It’s a game that might require a little bit of detective work, as well as perseverance and problem-solving skills. But your ingenuity will reward you with a greater understanding of your family and your place in the world. Not to mention hands-on information that will be an important legacy to leave to your descendants. Even if you choose not to use the genogram framework, this information about your family’s dynamics will still be valuable information to pass on in whatever form you wish. 11 | F a m i l y T i m e C a p s u l e
Ultimately, the process of creating a Family Time Capsule is like digging for buried treasure. Sometimes you have to sift through a lot of dirt, roots and rock and you may even reach a point where you think that it’s not worth the effort. But if you keep going in your search, you may stumble upon that pure gold that I wrote about earlier. This book is meant to serve as a map, of sorts, on your treasure hunt. I’m excited about the treasures you’ll discover in terms of family history and the personalities and characteristics of your family members. I look forward to hearing what you’ve discovered as you bring your family tree to life and leave a lasting legacy.
What to Expect This book is divided into three parts. Part One is about the big picture of this process and why you might want to create a Family Time Capsule. We’ll talk a lot about genograms and family dynamics and lay the foundation for beginning to create your own document. You won’t get anything on paper just yet, unless you want to skip ahead, so just sit back, relax and read as I lay the groundwork. In Part Two, we’ll do a bit of review to refresh your memory and firm up the foundation of everything we’ve covered so far. We’ll take an in-depth look at what a genogram is and then explain some of the symbols. Then we’ll get started on your actual genogram if that’s something you want to do. Then in Part Three, we’ll expand your Family Time Capsule to include several other tools to use in creating your lasting legacy. If you want to skip to the third section at this point and explore the other tools first, please feel free. There’s no right or wrong way to create a Family Time Capsule and no set of rules about what you have to include.
An Introduction to Genograms Many of us have old photographs that have passed down to us through the generations. Have you ever sifted through an old box of photographs and come across photos that you have no idea who the people are? They must have been important to your family at one time or they wouldn’t be in the box. But these old photos hold no meaning for you or possibly even your siblings. In essence, the smiling relative or friend in the photograph has been forgotten. If you’re lucky, someone wrote in the scrapbook or on the back of the photo the names of the people and the date when it was taken, like someone did with the photo of my great-grandparents. If you’re luckier still, someone wrote the place the photograph was taken and the event. But other than these few clues, we have to guess at the importance of these people in your family’s life. That said, one way to think of a genogram is as a detailed snapshot of your family tree. The snapshot isn’t a literal photograph, but it’s a 12 | F a m i l y T i m e C a p s u l e
snapshot put together with symbols and words to represent and bring to life the relationships and the personalities of the people in your family tree. This snapshot will be pieced together like the jigsaw puzzle mentioned earlier. Like archaeologists on an archeological dig, genograms unearth the family history to find within it themes and meaning. A genogram is a graphic representation—a diagram—of family members and their relationships over 3 to 5 generations, depending on where you are in the family life cycle. There are several genograms sprinkled throughout this book. Keep in mind that you are the star of this show—you and your family. We will start by documenting what you remember about your grandparents and parents and then we’ll move on to you and your siblings, if you have any. After that we’ll gather information about your children and grandchildren, maybe even great-grandchildren. Remember, you’re creating a legacy on paper, or in a digital file if you use genogram software. Something you can pass on to the younger members of your family so that they will get to know members of your family that they otherwise might not get to know. This process helps ensure that you and your memories will not be forgotten. Also, if you’re planning to write a memoir someday, or are in the process of that right now, creating a genogram can be an excellent way of gathering family information and accessing the memories you may want to use in your book.
The Power of Family Our families influence us greatly. In fact, there may be no greater influence on us. Our families can set us on a road to success with a deep sense of love and belonging—as I hope yours did for you. They can also be well-meaning and perhaps good enough, not causing any real harm, and all manner of things in-between. In the extreme, our families can even cripple us and make the journey harder. Whatever we experienced growing up, we inherit patterns of behavior that we carry with us our entire lives. We may not even realize where these patterns originated or how they were passed on from generation to generation. But they often have a profound effect on our development and how our life has played out. Families teach us how to be members of society. They teach us how to operate in the world, as well as how to relate to others. By good or not-so-good example, our families teach us how to be a friend, community member, a spouse and a parent. They teach us work ethics, how to care. They teach us what it means to be religious and spiritual—or not. Sometimes we learn attitudes such as whether to approach the world in a positive or negative way. For example, were you taught that the world was out to help you, out to get you, or a little of both?
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Our family of origin can influence how we see the world outside of our family and how we react to it. They can teach us how to embrace or deny our gifts, wishes, dreams, or circumstances. Whether we see family members frequently or if we haven’t been in contact with them for decades, they’re always there—inside us—in our DNA, our mannerisms and our memories. Whether we want to or not, we carry them into the future. At the same time, if you’re like most of us, there may be significant family friends or people who are not blood relatives who have also played a significant role in your life. You may want to include these people on your genogram and in your Family Time Capsule, as well. Sometimes friends can be of greater influence and play a greater role in your life than family does. You may know your friends a lot better than you know your family. There may be branches of your extended family tree that you choose to leave out. You may not even know certain relatives and perhaps they haven’t played even a remote role in your life. You can draw them into your genogram with a short explanation of the lack of contact or use one of the symbols in the genogram key that represents a broken off relationship in a family. Many people have “chosen” family in the form of close friends. In a way, our spouses and partners can be considered “chosen” family. As the concept of family and marriage evolve, more and more people don’t look like a traditional nuclear family. There are many single-parents in the world today. And some people choose to not have children, but have strong attachments to nieces and nephews, a godchild or their pets. It’s perfectly acceptable to include these on your genogram or expanded family tree. In fact, it’s encouraged. There are as many ways to define a family as there are families. A little later in this book you will be shown genograms of two famous people to illustrate to you the power of a genogram and anchor some of the concepts in place. But ultimately we’ll come back to you and your family—chosen or otherwise. This process can be an opportunity for you to expand your family tree and have it come alive with stories and interesting personalities. It will not only graphically document births, deaths, marriages, divorces, adoptions, and other significant events, but also windfalls and perhaps even great love affairs, as well as great tragedies. It will also show how your family lived and related, as well as give you awareness of how your family lives in you.
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Bringing Your Family into Clearer Focus Creating a genogram is like looking through the lens of your camera—the lens being your experience—and bringing your family into clearer focus. Every family benefits from being remembered in this intimate, up close and personal way. Instead of actual photographs—though you might want to include those, too—you’re leaving behind a detailed diagram of your family. You’re documenting what you remember—your family’s cast of characters, its quirks, its tragedies, its triumphs. I’ll also give instructions later on how to interview family members to unearth further family information, if that’s something that you want to do. So while we can all benefit from studying and collecting information on the great, great, greats in our families to get an expansive bird’s eye view of the overall landscape of our family trees, the genogram gives you a more intimate view. It’s a view from your experience. Your genogram documents your life and the life of your family in a very specific way. It graphically shows where you fit in relationship to the other people in your family. It documents emotional links and family patterns, along with successes and failures, strengths and weaknesses, as well as genealogical pedigrees and bloodlines. It lets people know that you were here and what you were like. It lets people know that you mattered.
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The farther backward you look, the farther ahead you can see." ~ Winston Churchill
A Family Reunion Analogy A genogram is a more intimate view of a family than you get from a standard genealogical research. Let me create a fictional example to illustrate. Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a 47 year old man named Jeff and the photographer at your family reunion. As you look through the lens of your camera you witness the three or four generations of family members gathered together who are smiling and talking and laughing. You remember how Great Aunt Gladys, who is standing next to your grandmother, raises greyhounds and is incredibly shy and has never married. She always wears purple. You used to visit her at her lake house when you were a child and you played endless games of Scrabble on the porch. Through the lens of your camera, you see 15 | F a m i l y T i m e C a p s u l e
your parents standing arm-in-arm, smiling at each other. They’ve had a passionate, but onagain off-again marriage. You remember the story of how they met and how similar it is to how you and your wife met. You see your goofy younger brother who has always been the clown and “baby” in the family. Next to him is your younger sister, chewing her bottom lip. She’s had dozens of jobs and can’t seem to find her place in the world, no matter how hard she looks. She’s talking to your older brother who is on his third marriage and whose latest wife doesn’t seem to know what to make of your family. Your brother has a PhD in literature and has been writing the great American novel for 25 years. His kids are joking around with your two daughters who are in their 20s and as different as night and day. One is an artist and another is an engineer. At opposite ends of the family gathering are your two uncles, your dad’s brothers, who haven’t spoken a word to each other since 1967. The whole family walks on egg shells around these two, but nobody really knows why. Your Grandmother Allen is in the center of the photograph. She’s the grand matriarch of the family. She still wears black even though your grandfather, who designed cars for Ford Motors and grew prize-winning orchids, died nearly a decade ago. This is your clan. Your tribe. This is where you belong. Below is a basic genogram of the hypothetical Allen family I just described. I won’t go over what all of the symbols mean just yet. This diagram will simply give you a sense of what a genogram actually is. As you can see, it’s a rather innovative “photograph” of a family.
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After a certain age, the more one becomes oneself, the more obvious one's family traits appear."
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~ Marcel Proust