Share |

Find Your Family - Writing your life story and keeping a journal

Article Date: 
6 April, 2012 (All day)

Guest Columnist - Cliff Jenkins

Many people have a sincere desire to write their life story up to the present and then continue to add over time.  They purchase bound journals with nice colors and numbered pages.. 

Then then write their life story.  They write through to their teenage years and then remember something they had forgotten about earlier in their life, but would now like to record.   Since the journal is bound they cannot go back and insert information later.  This can be very discouraging.

There is a simple solution to this.  Purchase a large white three ring binder,  about 150 pages of loose leaf paper, and 12 indexed tabs.  Label the indexed tabs for the decades of your life.  Using a clear view binder will allow you to design a cover that matches your style and personality.  

As you write your life story place the pages in the decade in which the events took place.  If you remember an event later you can now insert the page between pages that were written earlier.  As you write, date the pages with the date of the event to the best of your memory.  The best way to record dates is in the format of April 2012 Sunday.

After you have created your binder, put it on the night stand beside your bed.  Every night, before you say your prayers, go to the page according to the date and write in your journal.  Make some entry every day.  For example, here are two journal entries:

1. My wife and I kept daily journals for 48 years. We included the statement every Sunday, “We attended all our meetings today.” We then added other items.  That is 2,496 meetings that we attended.  We wanted our kids to know that we went to church every Sunday.

2. Shortly after we were married in 1957, we made an entry, “After work today we went to Silverdale and did our two weeks grocery shopping.  It cost $12.85.”  

All entries are important and all entries are interesting.  Taking time to write something, even if it is small, every day is the key.
http://www.morgannews.com/article/find-your-family-writing-your-life-story-and-keeping-journal
www.morgannews.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-10
37795
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:T5Y7MWCSQGOZTKIOFZ2SKM6YGIEFLOXO
<urn:uuid:53b9c184-fd41-47ba-884d-91a63d9e5a92>
2014-03-11T04:55:36Z
23.23.254.108
sha1:IFP5OLBMLALYNMSCEY7WG7IQSOXZPJOW
<urn:uuid:eb87e109-d83b-4db0-b221-2f69ecbcc1c4>
http://www.morgannews.com/article/find-your-family-writing-your-life-story-and-keeping-journal
length
response
<urn:uuid:9692a907-b75c-48c7-a0a2-0175e7ff2b7f>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-183-142-35.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-10
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for March 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf