What is a Family Museum and Why Make One? Part Two
A family museum can allow your family to discover parts of its history that have been lost in obscurity, show what life was like for your family in vanished times. Your museum can provide a walk through your family’s history.
Your museum can teach you and your children who you are.
I was raised in what amounted to a living history museum. I spent most of my young childhood weekends, holidays and summer vacations on a ranch in the high Rockies of Colorado that had been homesteaded by my great great grandfather, Elijah Adams McGregor.
I slept, played and ate in the hand-hewn cabin Elijah had built in the 1890s. I had cream from the “hundred-year-old pitcher” he had poured his cream from.
The log woodshop where Elijah had worked as a fine carpenter, creating most of the cabin’s furniture, still held Elijah’s tools. I now own some of that furniture and those tools. I waded in the irrigation canals ancestors had dug, and in the winter, I ice skated on them.
On the hill above the ranch, Elijah’s grave kept watch over the ranch while his stern portrait kept an eye on my behavior in the cabin. During long chatty ranch dinners, I listened to my elders tell colorful stories about him. I absorbed his value system of humor, hard work, neighborliness and honesty long before I could have articulated the meaning of those words. By the time I was a young adult, my life was intertwined so tightly with that of my ancestors that I could not have separated my identify from theirs. Most of my ancestors were dead by the time I was 21, but the legacy I absorbed as a child has always given me a sense of who I am and what is expected of me.
I once visited a beautiful home in which this type of legacy was utterly lacking. It was homey, comfortable, decorated with pictures of the couple who owned it and their children, in addition to beautiful things from their children’s travels all over the world. But there was something missing. You would have thought that this couple were Adam and Eve from the utter lack of any evidence that they had ancestors. Yet I knew this family had an amazing legacy that included ancestors who were close friends of Mormon church founder Joseph Smith, passengers on the Mayflower, prominent Puritan fighters for religious freedom. The wife is an accomplished genealogist who had sent us a copy of a book she wrote on her husband’s ancestors.
Hiding our legacy in filing cabinets and cedar chests rather than living gracefully and fully with it deprives our visually oriented children of the opportunity to learn naturally about their family legacy without us boring them with lectures. Instead, turn “all that old junk” you have inherited into a family museum by combining heirlooms, photographs, documents, and family legends into a meaningful way to teach your family naturally about your family’s past.
Making a family museum also can help you set in order your family heritage. It can help you to fulfill your stewardship to pass your heritage on to your children and to safeguard that heritage for them until they are of age. You have a responsibility to keep a record of your family to pass down to your children. Some of that record is not possible to remember without the artifacts which are symbols of it. Family heirlooms constitute a treasury of your family history.
By connecting with the past, you can fashion a better, richer present. Your family can experience its history through sight, hearing, touch, and even smell. A family museum gives context to your heritage so that it becomes more powerful and real. You cannot appreciate where you are and where you should go if you do not remember where you have been.
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