Guest Author - Terrie Lynn Bittner

As I've worked to write a history of one of my ancestors, I've longed for someone to find a long-forgotten journal tucked away in some colonial attic. I'm sure her life seemed very ordinary to her, as the busy mother of many children, a homemaker and a woman seeking spiritual truth, but to me, ten generations later, her life is filled with hundreds of unanswered questions. I wish my own parents had kept journals of their lives.

A life need not be one filled with the excitement of crossing an ocean from Holland to Plymouth, as was my ancestor's, or include the terrors of a hurricane or a war to be worthy of a journal. Everyday life is filled with just the sort of information your children, your grandchildren and your tenth-great-grandchildren will want to read. Think how many children have treasured the everyday experiences of Laura Ingalls Wilder, even though the events she recorded seemed ordinary and unimportant to her, because everyone she knew had a similar life. Today that life is so different from our own that we cannot imagine living as she did. Although the world doesn't seem terribly different to me now than it did when I was a child (especially when I see my daughter wearing an outfit identical to the one I wore at her age), my teenagers cannot imagine a life that included black and white television and did not include computers, microwave ovens and DVD players.

"It’s an odd idea for someone like me to keep a diary; not only because I have never done so before, but because it seems to me that neither I—-nor for that matter anyone else—-will be interested in the unbosomings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl. Still, what does that matter? I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart” (Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl [1952], 2).

The time will come when we are living in the Celestial Kingdom with an eternal family. Many of the people who belong to our family lived before our time or will live after we are gone. Wouldn't it be wonderful to be introduced to Great-great-great Grandma Lucy and know all about her life, as she described it in her own journal? Wouldn't you like your great grandchildren to know who you are, and to have developed a love for you through the messages you wrote for them in your own journal?

Start a journal and keep it safe. Be sure it travels through time to those whose hearts will be turned to their fathers and long to know you. Next week, I will share ideas about what to write in your journal, and the following week, I will explain how to make a family journal, perfect for those families who just can't quite catch the vision of personal journaling.