Talk about personal meaning-making. I found this image on Flickr. It was posted by Randy Waltrip, and the title is the same as this entry and his caption reads:
One of the things I really wanted to do with Sue and Bob was to drop by the old, three-flat house on Miflin Street where both her family and my mother's family had lived in the 1940's. She was kind enough to agree, and so we drove over to the old neighborhood and began to walk around the "historic house", with Sue sharing memories of her life as a girl there, and how much she had enjoyed having my Mom for a babysitter.
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You know, I never thought about this as a kind of tourism. As kids, we enjoyed accompanying our parents and grandparents on our own heritage tours, driving around in their former home towns and seeing where they used to live and go to school, trying to imagine what it looked like 'back then', as they would describe it. We also visited historic house museums and sites like Sturbridge and Williamsburg (as opposed to theme parks), so have always had this connection with the past. Today, we do the same with our son, repeating the stories handed down from our parents, and telling of our own life and memories. What a great way to teach history, to make a living connection with the past, with our own stories. This raises an interesting question - can we use this in our own historic house museums; is there a way we can make our stories more relevant by working on this type of connection? This is a great thought process - one I will be introducing for discussion at upcoming meetings.
I've often told people that history MUST be personalized to be interesting to people. Many of us bring the ability to personalize it ourselves, we're already interested in history. But for many others, you must find a way to help them make a personal connection with the stories you are telling.
Familial connections are a great, strong start for telling stories.
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