Do you have a ritual that you use when you put sad entries into your family tree? I don't have one and I need one, so I hope you will share if you have a ritual
I'm talking about deaths entered in near real-time. You receive a phone call, a text, an email or a message or post on social media. Someone in your family -- in your tree -- has died. It's a sad moment when I put that death into my family tree database. I'm not able to be detached and working in a research mode at that point.
It feels like I need more ceremony. A brief prayer doesn't feel like enough. If I were a Catholic, I might turn to my rosary.
In the past few months I've added a spouse for a granddaughter and a new baby. Those are new chapters and they bring joy. No problem. Entering older deaths also doesn't bother me. I can be detached when newly identifying someone who died 5 years ago or 200 years ago.
In the past year I've had to enter death details not only for my father, but also for two other members of the Greatest Generation. One was my Mom's second cousin, who was a genealogy mentor. The other was a distant cousin on my Dad's side who was a WWII veteran.
I know there will be far more deaths than births throughout the remaining years of my life. How do I honor those deaths? Do you have ideas?
No comments:
Post a Comment