Theme Reveal April #AtoZChallenge

Today is the much awaited Blogging from A to Z April Challenge Theme Reveal Day. I’m very excited to reveal my theme for 2018 and also cannot wait to check out the themes chosen by other bloggers for this year’s challenge.

After completing four previous A-Z challenges, this year, I have really Struggled to come up with a theme. I was thinking that I wouldn’t be able to participate this year, and that thought really disapppointed and upset me. But after giving it much thought, I have come up with a theme that excites me.

Today, on Theme Reveal Day, I can announce that my theme is The Story of Me. This might sound like a strange theme to some, but it’s the perfect theme for me to be blogging about at this time, and also the perfect theme for this genealogy/family history blog.

As a family history researcher, who has written the story of many ancestors, here and elsewhere, the need to write my story has been on my mind for a long time. I have even attempted it a few times, but never managed to make any progress. I couldn’t get past the fact that my story is ‘ordinary’. I always seem to struggle to make that ordinary story, interesting enough, for a reader to want to read. To me it seems more doable to tell my story in small bite size, alphabetical pieces.

When tracing a family, it’s easy to find the facts of dates and places, but finding the story of an ancestor is much more difficult. It is extremely important that we understand our ancestors stories, so that we can clearly understand their life. A life is much more than dates and places. This is why family historians are encouraged to interview our relatives.

Just a reminder from me, that if you’re researching your family, you really should interview your relatives, especially the elderly, and record that information. I always tell a new researcher to do it right away, even before recording dates and facts.  That information will always be there waiting to be recorded. Not so, our elderly relatives. So often, we leave it too late and many great stories are taken to the grave.

Tracking Down The Family is archived on Pandora Archive by so hopefully any future historian, looking for information on this family, or dare I say, looking for information about me even, will stumble across my ramblings. How I would love to find an A-Z series with the theme The Story of Me, written by one of my ancestors.

So hopefully the Story Of Me, that will unfold in April, will help a future researcher ‘put some meat on the bones of his/her research’ and get to know me better, even after I’ve left this world. It’s not that my story will be unusual or even exciting. It’s just the story of this ordinary person and her battles, challenges, wins and losses in a life that so far, in my opinion, has been well lived.

I am aware that this theme will probably ‘push many of my buttons’ and be confronting at times. This will be the first time, I’ve written anything personal on my blogs. I usually try to stay away from that. But I think that now is the right time to open up and be authentic about who I am, and how I became who I am.

The April A-Z Challenge, requires me to post every day in April, except Sunday, to a chosen theme. Some bloggers choose not to have a theme and that’s ok too.  One change this year is that, as April 1 is on Sunday, ‘A’ posts will be on Sunday. But there will be no other Sunday posts for the rest of the month.

 Please visit again to see my story unfold. 

 

Jennifer