Post #224 – Memoir Writing – Matilda Butler
The Seed of This Article Was Planted Several Years Ago
Kendra and I have a sister website called RosiesDaughters where we publish stories about Rosie the Riveter as well as her daughters. It’s the website we started after completing our award-winning collective memoir: Rosie’s Daughters: The “First Woman To” Generation Tells Its Story.
Over the years, we’ve invited readers to share their stories with us. Bill Thomas is one of our readers and wrote me to tell about his experience training some of the early Rosie the Riveters…training he did before joining the military with two of his buddies. I loved the story and we published it on the website. Over time, we posted three articles written by Bill. At the bottom of this article, you’ll find links to his Rosie the Riveter articles.
Recently, Bill sent me an email describing why he thinks writing life stories is so important. With his permission, I am publishing his article. I thought, no matter your age, that you’d like to read the perspective of a 92 year old as he writes to capture his life to share with others.
My advice? Begin as soon as you can. No reason to wait until you’re 92.
Thanks Bill for sharing your thoughts on memoir writing.
The BEST WAY to remember IS TO WRITE IT
by Bill Thomas
TO BE REMEMBERED; and TO REMEMBER OTHERS, ESPECIALLY IN YOUR FAMILY
MEMOIR WRITING… is on the increase.
All over America, people are eager and anxious to learn about their family heritage. People of all ages want to know about their immediate family and their ancestors. But, many families, today, as a family unit, are in disarray, confused and lonely.
People everywhere feel some of the emptiness in their lives is due to the lack of close family relationships as our forebears had. (I didn’t know I had four bears in my family.) Many individuals are uneasy about being alone in their multitude of thoughts, sorrows, and pleasures. They generally like people and sorely need the closeness of family relationships.
But with all the modern transportation so readily available, millions of parents, children, aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, nieces, in-laws, maternal and paternal grandparents, and all the step-parents and step-children are scattered all over the United States, and worldwide.
Even with our elaborate communications systems, many families try to keep in touch with each other by using holiday greeting cards, specialty cards, newsletters, informal letters, computer e-mail, telegrams, telephones, answering machines, etc.
Most of these messages are periodic, irregular, and not filled with family history. And even if family members live relatively close by, few families have done much about gathering and sharing their family history with other family members.
Until now. People, especially in the past dozen years, have intensified their interest in writing their life stories. Many thousands of individuals have been educating themselves by purchasing books and/or spending time in the libraries, in reading about the process of writing their personal memoirs, or doing a genealogy study of their ancestors .
As one example, my genealogy study took me back to the cave man days when one of my many hundred-times-removed uncle watched the guy who invented fire. My ancestor-uncle accidentally spilled some mug-wug coffee on the fire and was intrigued with what he saw, so he claimed to be the inventor of steam. The next morning, another uncle… Well, you’ll have to read my genealogy study for “the rest of the story.”
But I am not personally interested in doing extensive genealogy. I spent many hours in constructing a family tree. I realized I could only go back two generations, my parents and my grandparents.
I was born in the early 1920’s and grew up during the Great Depression. I never knew or met any of my grandparents, and I know little about my parents mostly because Dad was so busy earning a living in his barber shop, and Mother spent a lot of time in dressmaking and alterations. I was busy in my schoolwork, Greek School, violin lessons and newspaper deliveries. We were all just too busy with our lives to talk enough.
I love to write my memoirs. I continually write parts of my life story describing many of the incidents, events, and experiences that I lived through in my NINETY TWO years of life.
I have compiled a great number of personal and family stories and send copies to a dozen family members each year as Christmas presents. They each have a ring binder to put them in.
Each of us can be as selective as we want to be with what we choose to write about and what we will share with others. The big problem is finding and taking the time to get these relevant facts and feelings on paper. The same goes for you.
TAKE THE TIME TO DO IT. You’ll be glad you did.
One of the easiest things to do is leave YOUR workbook where it is handiest for you to jot in a few notes whenever you think of something significant that you may want to write about.
Thanks Bill for Sharing Your Perspective
Article by Bill Thomas describing working with Rosie the Riveters during WWII.
Article by Bill Thomas describing going to a movie with a Rosie the Riveter.
Article by Bill Thomas about a post-war marriage.
